When you drop a GoPro from space, two pretty obvious things happen.
One is that the camera gradually descends back to Earth, turning and twisting gracefully at first before plunging, screaming, back to our planet. The other is that you get some very nice video footage indeed.
While remembering to focus on the important task of building, landing and supplying Nasa with rockets, Elon Musk's private orbit-explorers SpaceX recently carried out exactly this "experiment". It placed a GoPro inside a fairing on one of its recent Falcon 9 launches -- it has not specified which -- and recorded the fall back to Earth.
SpaceX has now uploaded the real-time footage from the fall, and the result is very beautiful. GoPros are certainly hardy little things, as evidenced by the fact that several are now housed on the International Space Station.
Here is the clip, followed by three other examples of interesting GoPro footage recorded in space.
On 1 March 2015 Nasa astronaut Terry Virts recorded his full spacewalk outside the ISS with a GoPro camera. The video shows how Virts and fellow astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore installed 400 feet of cable and other communications equipment for the "Common Communications for Visiting Vehicles" system C2V2.
In this clip a team of amateur space enthusiasts attaches a GoPro to a weather balloon, sends it to the edge of space (about 30km), and then records the fall back to Earth. The entire flight lasted about two hours.
In this clip a GoPro doesn't go to space, but instead watches underneath a rocket as it undergoes a flight test. The intense inferno of the space under the rocket during the "static test" is captured while scientists measure the thrust, pressure, cooling and other data of the test launch.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
