WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Have you ever wanted to float around the International Space Station? Now’s your chance.
Since its launch in 1998 only 225 people have ever set foot upon the International Space Station (ISS). So that leaves only seven and a half billion or so of us who have never seen what the inside of the world’s most famous orbiting research station looks like inside. Now, though, a new NASA ultra-HD video aims to remedy that by taking you on an extended float around the ISS through a fish eye lens that takes in everything from mission patches on the wall to the spectacular views from the cuploa center.
The video isn’t the first peek we’ve gotten inside the ISS but the continuous slow motion float through provided in the new video, along with a soothing soundtrack, makes the tour more cinematic, calling up echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s classic, “2001: A Space Odyssey” film that was released in 1968. But, as you’ll see, unlike the space stations often depicted in sci-fi films the ISS isn’t a neat minimalist haven, it’s chockablock with tubes, wires, bundles, laptops andtrash containers.
The tour starts in the station’s cupola, a pod with several different windows that allow the astronauts on board to take in breath taking views of mother Earth and then it continues through several of the station’s other pods and shows, including the biolab and zero-gravity glovebox in the Columbus Module, the airlock used for loading and offloading experiments in Kibo, the Japanese module and orange bags holding ammonia respirators – just in case there’s a leak – in the Zarya Functional Cargo Block.
The entire video journey takes just over 18 minutes to complete, which means that if you were actually aboard the ISS during that time, you would have traveled about 5,141 mi (8,274 km) around the Earth’s orbit. That’s a lot of ground to cover, so without further ado, here’s the video.
