It’s not easy to make a religious first, especially when it's regarding a religion that’s thousands of years old and currently has more than 15 million followers worldwide.

On Friday, Eytan Stibbe, the 64-year-old former Israeli fighter pilot-turned-philanthropist and investor, became the first person to celebrate Passover from space. 

Stibbe serves as a mission specialist on the four-member Axiom Mission 1 crew that launched to the International Space Station a week ago on Friday, April 8.

“When I heard that Eytan will be in space and I know for sure, it’s a beautiful place to be with his colleagues and the other astronauts, but he won’t be with his immediate family and that is something that I wanted to make sure that he has that sense of warmth,” said Zvi Konikov, the rabbi at Chabad of the Space and Treasure Coasts.

Passover has been celebrated for thousands of years and marks the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. It begins at sunset with a special meal called a Seder. 

It’s a moment filled with deep meaning and symbolism, like the four glasses of wine that are filled to the brim “as a sign of blessing, as we want our blessings to spill over,” Konikov said.

He noted that a fifth cup is left out for Elijah the Prophet. “We always leave room for redemption, for hope, for the promise of our future redemption.”

Keeping the faith in space

The Ax-1 mission didn’t always cross paths with Passover. Originally, the 10-day mission was targeting no earlier than a January launch date. By September 2021, the launch date shifted to February 21, 2022, and then Feb. 28, due to “station traffic planning,” according to Kathy Lueders, the associate administrator of the Space Operations Mission Directorate at NASA. 

On January 18, 2022, at the end of a blog post about activity aboard the Space Station, NASA announced another shift in launch schedule, this time to March 31 “to account for additional spacecraft preparations and space station traffic.”

Another shift in timing was announced by Axiom Space on March 18, stating that the launch date was moving again, this time to “allow teams to complete final spacecraft processing ahead of the mission.” 

This new launch date put the mission head-to-head against the wet dress rehearsal testing of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft ahead of the Artemis I mission. Teams at Kennedy Space Center determined that the WDR happening at Launch Complex 39B (LC-39B) would take precedence over the private astronaut launch at LC-39A and the final launch date of April 8 was set. 

With that new timing in mind, Konikov and the Chabad in Satellite Beach worked with Stibbe to figure out how he could take part in the Seder from space.

Konikov helped create a care package that was able to be delivered in time before the launch that included things like juice boxes instead of wine, a Haggadah (a prayer book used during Seder) and hand-baked shemurah matzah, made using wheat grown in Ukraine. 

He noted the dual significance of that: that the Chabad movement has deep roots in Ukraine and that centers there are working to help those fleeing the impacts of the war.

“Matzah actually means 'the bread of hope, the bread of faith.' And it humbles me that my colleagues are out there in Ukraine on the front lines, helping bringing hope, not only to provide warm meals, but to provide that hope and that sense of security, regardless of where the people are,” Konikov said.

Being able to celebrate his faith while traveling in space was something that Stibbe noted was of great importance to him. During a pre-launch press conference, he said he looked forward to celebrating this important part of his faith.

“The Seder, Passover is all about freedom, which is a value that we celebrate annually and remind ourselves about the importance of freedom. It is based on a 3,000-year-old story where Moses had the famous sentence, ‘Let my people go,’” Stibbe said, singing the last line in an apparent reference to the African-American spiritual.

From one astronaut to another

While working with Stibbe to pull off a celestial Passover was a first for Konikov, it wasn’t the first time he’s helped someone observe the mitzvot, or Jewish commandments, while in orbit. 

Nearly 20 years prior, Konikov had the pleasure of working with the first Israeli astronaut who went to space: Ilan Ramon, a payload specialist who would go onto perish in the disaster that killed the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003. 

Like with Stibbe, he had to come up with some creative methods for keeping Shabbat rituals. He said that those memories helped him work with Stibbe.

“According to Jewish law, he would need to follow the time according to the time of departure from Cape Canaveral,” Konikov said. “So, the time that we keep the Seder, that’s the time that the astronauts set for the duration of their journey.”

As Stibbe noted during the pre-launch crew press conference, Ramon was a “good friend” of Stibbe and served as his commander in the Israeli Air Force. Following his death, Stibbe helped create The Ramon Foundation in his honor.

During his time aboard the Space Station, Stibbe is working on The Rakia Mission, described with the goal “to inspire the younger generation while advancing and expanding the Israel space industry.” 

“I will be continuing an experiment he started 19 years ago, mainly focused on the observation of thunderstorms,” Stibbe said.

The Ax-1 crew is set to undock from the Space Station on April 19 and splash down off the coast of Florida the following day.