Their American counterparts may be all business, but at least one Russian cosmonaut decided to exhibit a flair for the dramatic. Yury Malenchenko already had a storied career in space, his home away from home — he spent half of 1994 on the Mir space station, served as a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-102), stayed for a time on the International Space Station, and had many spacewalks and mission commands in addition. But there just was one thing he could not wait for a landing to do.

On this day, August 10, in 2003, Yuri Malenchenko, in orbit 260 miles above the earth, exchanged “I dos” with his beloved Ekaterina Dmitriev back on Earth, in NASA headquarters. The two were joined via a private, untelevised, video uplink.

Malenchenko appeared next to his spaceshipmate and best man Ed Lu and his bride entered in to the makeshift wedding hall to the tune of David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners”. The only hitch was that according to Texas law, someone physically had to be present to stand in for Yuri — his friend from Moscow, a flight surgeon volunteered for the occasion. After pronounced husband and wife, the two blew kisses to each other and Ekaterina exited to the sound of Mendelssohn’s traditional “Wedding March”.