Nine years ago this week, Yuri Malenchenko saw his wife in person for the first time.
Of course, Yuri had seen Ekaterina many many times before, but she hadn't been his wife those times.
But now, after two and a half months of marriage, he was actually getting to be with the woman he married.
When the young Ekaterina Dmitriev pictured her future wedding, she most likely never imagined it being in an auditorium on a government installation. She probably never pictured that the "groom" at the reception would be a cardboard cut-out of the man she was marrying.
Of course, she also likely imagined that her new husband would be in space at the time.
Nine years ago this week, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko returned to Earth after six months in orbit as a member of the Expedition 7 crew of the International Space Station, during which he had become the first person to get married in space.
Malenchenko was practically born to be a cosmonaut -- he was born eight months after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and his parents named him in honor of the first spaceman. He became a cosmonaut in 1987, and after years of training, was commander of the Mir space station for four months in 1994.
His next flight, in 2000, was aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, and between that mission and preparation for future International Space Station expeditions, Malenchenko began spending time in Houston, Texas, home of NASA's Johnson Space Center. It was there that he met Dmitriev, whose family had emigrated from Russia when she was four, and settled in Texas. On April 12, 2002, Kat and Yuri met at a party in Houston celebrating the anniversary of Malenchenko's namesake's first flight.
When Malenchenko returned to Russia for further training, the couple continued their relationship remotely, and in December of that year, he proposed. Overwhelmed by the challenge of finding time to plan a wedding, much less finding a time to hold it, they decided to make history by holding the first space-to-Earth nuptials.
The wedding was held in a video downlink from the station, with the bride and guests in the Gilruth Center at Johnson Space Center. After the vows, the couple blew kisses to each other, and Malechenko's crewmate, Ed Lu, playing the wedding march on a keyboard aboard the station.
Since then, Malechenko has returned to space twice. He was part of the station's Expedition 16 crew in 2007, and he is currently in orbit as part of Expedition 32 and 33. He and Kat are still married, and have one child.
So the next time you're at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, swing through the mock-up of a space station module on display there, and try to imagine where the flowers should go.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
