NASA astronaut Anil Menon and two fellow crew members cast electronic ballots in the United States midterm elections from the International Space Station on Tuesday. The station orbits more than 400 kilometres above Earth, and the three Americans aboard sent their votes to election officials on the ground.
Menon announced the vote himself on X. He wrote that the crew had the chance to vote from orbit and that the ballots were filled out and sent to officials. His post opened with a line that is hard to forget:
"Yes, you can even vote from space!"
The full message added more detail. "All three US crew members had the privilege of voting from space station. We filled out an electronic ballot and sent it securely to the election officials," he said.
Their room became the polling booth. In a video he released, Menon described voting from his own quarters on the station. For that brief stretch, the space where he sleeps and works functioned as a polling booth. He filled in an electronic form and sent it to the Harris County election officials in Texas.
The ballots did not travel by any special channel. According to the reports, they moved the same way as other data passing between the station and mission control, through NASA’s Near Space Network. That network is run by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Secrecy was built into the process. The ballot was converted into a special code to protect the privacy of each vote. Only the crew member who cast it and the election officials receiving it could view the contents.
Menon is no stranger to the station. He reached the ISS on July 14 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Luke Delaney and Jessica Watkins arrived there on October 1 on a SpaceX mission, which means the crew that voted on Tuesday was a mix of people who had launched on different rockets months apart.
The election they voted in is a large one. Americans were choosing all 435 members of the House of Representatives, 37 Senate seats, 36 governors and a range of local elected officials. Each of those races carries its own weight, and for three people floating above the planet, the ballot was simply another task to complete before the day ended.
What makes the moment stick is how ordinary the mechanics were. There was no dramatic launch, no alarm and no special effect. A crew member filled out a form, the data crossed a secure network and officials on the ground received it. The science fiction version of this story would have a spaceship and a sealed envelope. The real version was an electronic ballot, a coded file and a network that already carries the station’s everyday data.
That is the detail readers keep coming back to. Voting from orbit sounds like a line from a novel, yet the process was built on systems NASA already runs. The crew did not need a new kind of democracy to take part. They used the tools they had, and the votes were sent down to Earth.
TL;DR
- NASA astronaut Anil Menon and two crewmates cast electronic ballots from the International Space Station in the US midterm elections.
- The three crew members are more than 400 km above Earth and sent their ballots securely to election officials.
- Menon’s ballot was sent to Harris County, Texas election officials after he filled out an electronic form.
- Ballots traveled through NASA’s Near Space Network, operated by Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
- The ballot was coded so only the voter and election officials could view it.
- Americans voted for 435 House seats, 37 Senate seats, 36 governors and local officials.
