When a judge pronounced them man and wife they blew each other kisses across the ether, in a ceremony being touted as the first wedding to be celebrated between Planet Earth and space.

The groom, Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko, was aboard the orbiting International Space Station, hurtling some 400 kilometers (240 miles) above New Zealand, during the ceremony on Sunday afternoon.

His bride, 27-year-old Yekaterina Dmitriyeva, was at an auditorium at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas that had been decorated to look like a wedding chapel, according to a Houston Chronicle report.

Malenchenko and his best man, US astronaut Edward Lu, participated via video, appearing on a huge screen in front of the wedding party and some 200 invited guests.

At the wedding reception at a nearby restaurant, where guests enjoyed smoked salmon and borscht, the bride had to settle for lifesized cardboard cutouts of her groom and his best man.

"As Yuri is the furthest away, we are the closest because of the communication that we have," Dmitriyeva was quoted as saying at the reception.

"It was a celestial, soulful connection that we have."

Texas law allows a marriage to be celebrated when one of the parties is absent for valid reasons -- usually because they are in the military or in prison. US officials accepted a space mission as one such reason.

Malenchenko went ahead with the wedding despite the initial opposition of his Russian Space Agency (RSA) superiors, who saw the union as a potential breach of security.

Malenchenko, who is divorced, proposed to Dmitriyeva in December before blasting off for the ISS in April. Dmitriyeva is a US citizen who emigrated from the Soviet Union with her parents when she was four.

They plan to hold a second, firmly earthbound wedding in a church in Russia when Malenchenko returns to Earth in October, and then spend their honeymoon in Australia.

SPACE.WIRE