Just being aboard the International Space Station seems like it would be a pretty stressful experience — I mean you’re floating up there… in space and stuff, you know? — but things get really interesting when astronauts are tasked with leaving the confines of the space station to take care of business outside.
Spacewalks are a big deal, and astronauts perform them for a variety of reasons, such as making repairs to the outside of the ship, installing new tools, or launch things into space. It makes sense that these high-intensity events are recorded, but a recent spacewalk performed by Russian cosmonauts hit a snag when they accidentally broke a GoPro camera. Oops!
The camera was supposed to be capturing a 360-degree view of the exterior of the space station for new agency RT, but the cosmonauts busted it while trying to attach it. The camera’s “plastic case got damaged,” resulting in the camera eventually breaking down while in the midst of recording the spacewalk.
The spacewalk was being performed so that the cosmonauts could toss a handful of tiny research satellites into Earth orbit and take care of a few odds and ends. The spacewalk was particularly lengthy, spanning nearly eight hours, but RT reports that the camera remained in working order just long enough to record what it needed to before involuntarily shutting down.
RT uses footage from the camera to produce 360-degree video of events like this, but it seems as though this one will need to be a bit shorter than usual. There’s been no mention of whether the camera can be brought back from the dead, or if its life was indeed claimed by the ravages of space.
In any case, it doesn’t appear as though any of this is actually GoPro’s fault. It would seem the camera’s damage was purely the result of being poorly installed. It is, however, kind of funny that a cosmonaut being trusted to shove scientific satellites into orbit can’t clip on an action camera without breaking it, but hey, we all make mistakes.
