Three NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station voted in the U.S. midterm elections on November 3. Anil Menon, Luke Delaney, and Jessica Watkins cast ballots electronically from the orbiting laboratory. "We filled out an electronic ballot and sent it securely to the election officials," Menon wrote on X.
Menon used his computer in his ISS quarters to complete the voting process. The electronic ballot traveled through NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System to a ground antenna at White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. From there, NASA routed it to Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, then to Harris County election officials. The ballot remained encrypted and accessible only to the astronaut and the county clerk.
Most NASA astronauts register in Harris County because it is home to Johnson Space Center, the agency's human spaceflight hub. Americans have voted from space since 1997, when Texas passed legislation permitting it. NASA astronaut David Wolf became the first to use this law, voting from Russia's Mir space station that year.
Delaney and Watkins launched to the ISS on October 1 aboard SpaceX's Crew-13 mission. Menon arrived in mid-July aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The three share the station with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and cosmonauts Anna Kikina, Pyotr Dubrov, and Sergey Teteryatnikov.