- Astronauts have voted in U.S. elections since 1997 when the Texas Legislature passed a bill that allowed NASA astronauts to cast ballots from orbit.
- Just like any other voter, astronauts can fill out an application to request an absentee ballot and are provided with an electronic form.
- Ballots filled out in space are then beamed to Earth the same way most data is transmitted from the space station to mission control.
As millions of Americans who haven’t already voted early are preparing Tuesday to head to their local polling places, a select few will be casting their ballots from 250 miles above Earth.
Just because a handful of American astronauts won’t be able to get to their local schools, churches and rec centers to vote in the 2024 presidential election doesn’t mean they can’t still make their voices heard. That’s because for nearly 20 years, NASA has had a plan in place that allows spacefarers to perform their civic duty all the way from orbit.
Ahead of the Nov. 5 election, four Americans are in space who may want to vote. That includes the two Boeing Starliner astronauts who originally thought they’d be back to Earth in time to vote in person before their spacecraft was sent home without them.
The process for voting from the International Space Station may sound familiar to voters who cast absentee ballots, but of course, it’s a little more complicated. As NASA explains, voting from orbit involves encrypted ballots flowing from satellites to a ground antenna before being received by county clerks to be tallied.
Here’s everything to know about how astronauts vote from space:
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Who on the International Space Station may want to vote for president?
On Sept. 30, American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov became the most recent spacefarers to reach the International Space Station, joining Expedition 72.
Of the seven people aboard the orbital outpost, Hague is now among four Americans who will be in space during the election, which also includes Don Pettit, who arrived with two Cosmonauts in September, and Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.
A few months ago, Williams and Wilmore expressed their intent to vote from space.
“It’s a very important role that we all play as citizens, to be included in those elections, and NASA makes it very easy for us to do that,” Wilmore told reporters during a September 13 news conference from the space station.
Added Williams: “Looking forward to being able to vote from space, which is pretty cool.”
Williams and Wilmore were only meant to be at the space station for 10 days when they arrived in June as part of the first crewed test flight for the Boeing Starliner, which NASA has hopes of commissioning for regular orbital trips. But now that NASA sent the Starliner back to Earth empty after deeming the vehicle unsafe for a crew, Wilmore and Williams will instead return in February on a SpaceX Dragon with Hague and Gorbunov.
First astronaut votes from space in 1997
Before the era of the space station, American astronauts weren’t away from Earth long enough to lose out on exercising their civic duty.
That changed in 1996 when astronaut John Blaha couldn’t vote in that year’s presidential race between President Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, NPR reported in 2020. At the time, Blaha was serving on Russia’s Mir Space Station, a predecessor to the International Space Station.
Because most NASA astronauts live in Houston, Texas lawmakers who heard of Blaha’s inability to case a ballot were quick to take action. A year later in 1997, then-Gov. George W. Bush signed the legislature’s bill into law, creating a measure within the Texas Administrative Code allowing for early voting from space, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum explained in 2020.
That same year, astronaut David Wolf became the first American to cast a ballot from the old Mir space station – or “vote while you float,” as NASA joked.
“It’s something that, you know, you might or might not expect it to mean a great deal,” Wolf told NPR in 2008. “But when you’re so removed from your planet, small things do have a large impact.”
Who else has voted from space?
The process hasn’t changed much in the years since.
Mir was decommissioned and de-orbited in 2001 to make way for the International Space Station, which now serves as the polling place for astronauts (they even list their addresses as “low-Earth orbit,” according to the Smithsonian.)
Since Wolf pioneered voting from space, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins has also cast a ballot from orbit – twice, in fact. Rubins first voted in the 2016 presidential election from the International Space Station, and next cast her cosmic ballot again in 2020, according to NASA.
NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli also voted in March as Texas residents from the space station, filling out electronic absentee ballots.
How do astronauts cast a ballot on the space station?
Just like any other voter, astronauts can fill out an application to request an absentee ballot and are provided with an electronic form that may be recognizable to any Americans who cast their votes that way.
Once the forms are uplinked to NASA’s Johnson Space Center Mission Control, astronauts use unique credentials to access the ballot and cast their votes from the space station, according to NASA.
Ballots filled out in space are then beamed to Earth the same way most data is transmitted from the space station to mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Votes cast in space travel through NASA’s Near Space Network, a fleet of antennas systems and relay satellites that provides communication and navigation services to the space station.
After the ballots are encrypted and uploaded into the space station’s on-board computer system, they are routed through a tracking and data relay satellite to a ground antenna at the NASA White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The space agency then transfers ballots to mission control in Houston, which provides them to the county clerks responsible for processing them.
The astronauts may not get the coveted “I Voted” sticker, but they can claim something a heck of a lot cooler: Voting in zero gravity sure beats voting from the local community center.
A version of this story was last published March 5.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com