The first - and only - wedding held in SPACE (PHOTOS)

The couple are Ekaterina Dmitrieva, a U.S. citizen of Russian descent, and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, who got married via a satellite video link. American astronaut Edward Lu, the second member of the expedition to the ISS, witnessed it and performed Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ on a portable synthesizer in space, which Joanne Woodward, the organizer of the space wedding, described as “very sweet”.“As Yuri was further away, he was closer to me because of the communication we have,” Ekaterina Dmitrieva told The New York Times on the day.After the ceremony, Ekaterina and her guests went to the Italian restaurant Villa Capri in Clear Lake near Houston, where… a life-size plywood cutout Malenchenko was waiting for them.On that day, the Russian Mission Control Center never got in touch with the groom, saying that the wedding was his private business, so there was no cause to spend any state resources on that. In 2006, the couple had a daughter, Camilla.At the time, many experts predicted that Malenchenko’s career was over, since he had dared go against his superiors, but the cosmonaut went on two more ISS missions after that - in 2007 and in 2012.And yet, the space wedding did leave its mark. After it, contracts that cosmonauts sign before space missions have a clause banning them from having wedding ceremonies in orbit.The main consequence of his space wedding caught up with Malenchenko in 2019.