WATCH: Astronauts Ring In The New Year 16 Times From Space
(CBS SF) -- Astronauts on board the International Space Station celebrated New Year's Day 16 times as it orbited the globe at 17,500 miles per hour.
The new year officially started for the crew at midnight GMT, also known as the Universal Time Clock -- the same time as London.
There was no bubbly, but Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his crew, which includes NASA's Terry Virts, Russian astronauts Elena Serova, Alexander Samoukutyaev and Anton Shkaplerov, and European Space Agency's Samantha Cristoforetti, celebrated with fruit juice toasts instead, NASA said.
"We did a little calculating and we figure we will be over midnight somewhere over the Earth, 16 times throughout this day. So we plan to celebrate New Year's 16 times with our comrades, our people down on Earth that are doing it at that very moment, so we're going to do the same thing, that's our plan," Wilmore said from space.
Wilmore has been aboard the space station since late September and will remain in orbit until March 2015.
