Every year, the crews aboard the International Space Station mark Halloween with improvised costumes built from whatever they can scrounge in orbit — stowage containers, flight suits, duct tape, and imagination. NASA's photo gallery documents more than fifteen years of this tradition, from Expedition 21 in 2009 through Expedition 73 in 2025. The standout details are small and specific. ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano finally got to "fly like Superman" during Expedition 37 — a joke that only works when you're actually floating. Roscosmos flight engineer Sergei Prokopyev dressed as Elvis Presley while ESA's Alexander Gerst went full Darth Vader inside the Kibo module during Expedition 57. Serena Auñón-Chancellor completed the trio as a mad scientist. Expedition 68 in 2022 might be the creative peak: Koichi Wakata, Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, and Josh Cassada dressed as popular video game and cartoon characters, repurposing stowage containers as costume elements and fashioning improvised trick-or-treat bags. The constraint — you can only use what's already on the station — forces a kind of resourcefulness that makes Earth-side costumes look lazy. The gallery spans international crews from NASA, ESA, JAXA, and Roscosmos, which quietly underscores something worth noticing: these are multinational teams that train together for years, depend on each other for survival, and still find time to be ridiculous together. The costumes are goofy. That's the point. Expedition 66 took a different approach — Shane Kimbrough, Thomas Pesquet, Akihiko Hoshide, and Mark Vande Hei showed off Halloween cards rather than full costumes. Not every crew goes all-in, and that's fine. The tradition adapts to whoever's on board. The 2023 and 2025 entries round out the timeline, with Expedition 70 (Jasmin Moghbeli, Satoshi Furukawa, Loral O'Hara, Andreas Mogensen) and Expedition 73 continuing the streak. NASA notes that the station "remains a vital scientific platform," but this particular page isn't about science — it's about humans being human 250 miles above Earth. This is a photo gallery, not a story with a thesis. It does exactly what it sets out to do: show you that astronauts celebrate holidays in space, and that the results are charming. If you need more than that, you're reading the wrong page.
