Steph Deschamps / October 23, 2020
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Like 47 million Americans, Kate Rubins voted early in the November 3 election. But the astronaut is the only one to have used a space urn.
"On board the international space station: I voted today," she captioned a photograph posted on NASA's Twitter account Thursday. Hair floating in weightlessness, the 42-year-old astronaut poses in front of a handwritten sign reading "ISS polling station," where she arrived in mid-October.
In the absence of a voting booth and paper ballots, she actually voted through an encrypted email, sent to an election official on land. Three other American astronauts were due to do the same, but their mission, scheduled for October 31, has been postponed and they will be on earth on polling day.
The rules for voting in the United States vary from state to state, but in Texas, where American astronauts are based, a law was passed in 1997 to explicitly provide for the procedure for voting from space.