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 wrote in the caption of a photo uploaded Thursday, October 22 on the NASA Twitter account.
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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 in fact voted through an encrypted email, transmitted to an electoral officer on Earth.
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 election 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.
Several astronauts have already used it, starting with Kate Rubins who was already in the stars during the 2016 election.
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In a video message recorded before her departure, she considers
“essential to participate in
American
democracy”
.
“It's important that everyone votes,”
she continues.
"If we get there from space, I think people can get there from below as well."
