Astronaut Jessica Meir Takes Daughter’s Stuffed Rabbit to International Space Station
When SpaceX Crew-12 launches from Florida next week to the International Space Station, it will carry a special keepsake: a small stuffed rabbit belonging to American astronaut Jessica Meir’s three-year-old daughter.
Meir, 48, revealed Sunday that she will take one of two such toys to orbit—since her daughter has two because one was given as a gift. The other will remain with her on Earth.
“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,” Meir said during an online news conference.
NASA reports Crew-12 is scheduled to launch early Wednesday from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission will replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January—a month earlier than planned due to the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history.
Meir, a marine biologist and physiologist who served as flight engineer on a 2019-2020 expedition and participated in the first all-female spacewalks, gave birth to her daughter after her previous mission. She has since faced the challenge of an eight-month separation from her 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 she expressed hope her daughter would one day understand the significance of this absence: “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.”
The International Space Station, continuously inhabited for the last quarter century, is scheduled to be deorbited in 2030. When Crew-12 arrives, they will be among the final crews to live aboard this football field-sized laboratory.
The mission crew includes NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
