What do you do when nobody is around to take your picture? You take a selfie(自拍照). But what about selfies in space? Last year, NASA astronaut(宇航员)Buzz Aldrin who famously became the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969, said that he took the first selfie in space during the Gemini Ⅻ mission in 1966.
"For me, it needs to be digital to be a selfie," argues Jennifer Levasseur, who is in charge of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to Levasseur, the idea of a selfie is directly linked to Internet culture and the human wish to interact(互动)on social platforms. "The thing that makes a selfie is sharing it," she says.
Still, astronauts have been carrying cameras aboard space vehicles since the 1960s, and they've taken plenty of pictures of themselves along the way. Astronauts had to pull the film magazines(胶卷暗盒)out and leave their cameras behind when they returned to Earth, because early space missions had a weight limit on the return trip.
A big change in space camera technology came after the sad loss of the space shuttle Columbus, which broke apart on its return to Earth in 2003. "Fearing that they would never be able to bring the film back from space and lose all that hard work quickened the pace for digital," Levasseur says.
Today, astronauts can have access to the Internet and social platforms in space and post true space selfies taken by digital cameras. Taking selfies and sharing them on social media is a way that astronauts in space can participate in the same activities people on Earth do every day. The first astronaut selfie that went viral(网红的)on the Internet was one by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide in 2012.
