International Space Station astronauts show off creative outfits for Halloween

The International Space Station crew dressed up in Halloween costumes one day ahead of their next spacewalk.

The four astronauts working in the U.S. segment posed, trick-or-treating style, with costumes in the Japanese Kibo module of the International Space Station on Wednesday (Oct. 31). Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency posted the costumes on X (formerly Twitter) and invited the audience to guess what the crew is wearing.

Two of the astronauts, NASA’s Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli, will then don very different outfits —  spacesuits  —  on Thursday (Nov. 1) for a rare all-woman spacewalk. Coverage is starting at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT), which you can watch here at Space.com via NASA Television.

Related: Jupiter has a creepy ‘face’ in haunting Halloween photo by NASA’s Juno probe

Space.com staff did their best at guessing the costumes, but if you have more ideas feel free to share it in the forums (link below the story). Looking at the costumes, clockwise:

• NASA’s Moghbeli is wearing a box-shaped costume labeled “bread”, with a picture of herself and her twin girls in front. It’s possible she may be calling herself a “breadwinner” of her family, or that she’s trying to depict a particular flavor like peanut butter-and-jelly with the colors of the costume and of the photo.
• Satoshi Furukawa from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is wearing a Luigi hat. Luigi is one of the plumber-brother protagonists from Nintendo’s flagship Mario franchise, who in many games battles creatures emerging from sewer pipes. The franchise spans several generations of gaming, alongside tie-ins like toys, theme parks and movies.
• NASA’s O’Hara wears a Colorado-themed hat, along with a picture of mountains that reads “Go Outside: Never Stop Exploring.” The “go outside” may be a joke related to her forthcoming spacewalk. As for the Colorado connection, O’Hara once told Kansas University that “a lot of my childhood was spent going to the mountains in Colorado and looking at rocks.”
• ESA’s Mogensen sports a tinfoil hat similar to the type made famous in the 2002 movie “Signs”, a fictional tale of an alien invasion involving crop circles. The T-shirt, “Birds Aren’t Real”, refers to a popular (and likely satirical) Gen Z movement about conspiracy theories, according to Snopes.

Dressing up in costume on the ISS is a long-standing tradition among astronaut crews. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly once made a surprise appearance in a gorilla costume during a 2016 excursion, for example, playfully trying to chase down crewmates in weightlessness.

More recently, in 2022 ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti cosplayed as the famous flight attendant from the 1968 sci-fi flick, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (That’s the individual, played by actress Edwina Carroll, who slowly walks around a space station hatch until completely inverted in the camera’s view.)

You can also check out Space.com’s collection of Halloween costumes at the ISS over the years, including Elvis, Superman and Darth Vader.