Source: The Telegraph
December 14, 2015
Father Sergei has been parish priest in Baikonur for 22 years, but he only performed his first rocket blessing in 1998.
“It all began with a crew going up to the Mir space station. It turned out one of them wasn’t baptised before the flight and wanted to be, so they called me,” he said.
The impromptu ceremony took place in a bathtub at the Cosmonaut’s hotel. Shortly afterwards he was asked to start blessing rockets. Since then, he says, every rocket that leaves this spaceport gets similar treatment.
“We bless all the crews, regardless of whether they are Orthodox or not. One is always worried for people who take such risks,” he told the Telegraph shortly after conducting the ceremony for Tim Peake’s Soyuz FG rocket at the launch pad on Monday. “Every time I do it, it is like lightening my spirit,” he said.
Families of the crew who wish to attend also receive a dousing with holy water - as well as the press corps attending the ceremony.
The Orthodox blessing - now a firmly established part of the rituals of space flight from Baikonur - is a relatively recent addition to a set of traditions dating back to Yuri Gagarin’s first flight from launch pad No. 1 in 1961.
Gagarin’s most famous contribution was stopping the bus on the way to the launch pad so he could take a leak. Since then, legend has it, every male cosmonaut blasting off from Baikonur has followed suit. There are differing accounts, however, of whether or not one should urinate on the right or left rear wheel of the bus.
Tonight, in another tradition, Mr Peake and his colleagues will attend a compulsory screening of White Sun of the Desert, 1970 drama set in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War.
One of the best-loved comedy-dramas the Soviet Union ever produced, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with space flight, astronauts, or science - fictional or otherwise.
But maybe that’s the point - it gives the astronauts a way of resting their minds on something completely different before they set out to the stars tomorrow.
