Astronaut Anne McClain: The Tale of Spacewalk Selfies | International Space Station
Expedition 73 flight engineer and NASA astronaut Anne McClain: "EVA Perspective 1: EVA time is precious and requires uninterrupted focus, so sometimes there just is not an opportunity to take many photos. We normally carry a camera attached to our suit for a variety of reasons—we get to see parts of the International Space Station that our permanently mounted cameras cannot see, so we take them for the ground teams, or we install some hardware and take closeout photos to verify the final configuration, or we see some damage from a micrometeorite and snap a shot. In between all that work, we try to find a moment here or there for some fun photos—spacewalking is rare, and we want to capture the moment. The opportunity normally presents itself when ground is talking through the plan and we are waiting on our next instructions—if you listen closely to a spacewalk, you are apt to hear something like 'this will take a couple minutes, you can hold there and take some photos.' That is our cue to pull out the camera to capture everything around us, and perhaps turn the camera back on ourselves."
"Grabbing a selfie during a spacewalk is not as easy as it looks. We use commercial cameras wrapped in a thermal blanket, and with our gloves it is hard to tell where the button is or if we successfully clicked it. If we try to hold the camera in one hand, it feels like holding a basketball with a ski glove, so two-handed is the way to go. Our arms also don’t extend super far in the suit; if your wingspan is 6 feet normally, you can expect a wingspan of 3.5-4 feet in a suit. So in a two-handed selfie pose, the camera ends up pretty close, and we aren’t quite sure where its aimed. The technique is to just start clicking and hope for the best."
1st photo: "My first spacewalk selfie in 2019, and I remember it because it was the first time I went 'hands free'from ISS. Meaning, connect a local (short) tether, let go and back away a little bit, hold the camera in two hands, and start clicking. I think I took about 25 of these, 3-4 of which turned out okay. This was taken while I was at the airlock waiting for my crewmate to translate back."
2nd photo: "From our May 1 spacewalk, a shot into the sun visor. I had actually forgotten to put it up, but love the reflections that resulted. It also shows the camera set up well as well as my crewmate, Nichole Ayers. We were located over Arizona at the time, and over my right shoulder you can see Baja California."
3rd photo: "Also from May 1, taken when we were both given a few minutes by the ground while they re-worked the forward plan. It is rare to both get a break at the same time, and even rarer to be co-located. So, we had to try for an epic shot. Amongst many photos of helmet lights, fingers, space, and bag straps was this gem . . . the extremely rare two-person spacewalk selfie! Note Nichole’s hand—she was having to hold me in place because I had two hands on the camera—and on just a tether, we are basically a balloon on a string."
4th photo: "Bonus content, a spacewalk fist bump. This required one-handed camera ops, so while I thought I took about 30 photos, I actually took only 5. This one is the only relatively decent one! My tether was connected far off to my side, so it did not provide any stability, and I was not in an area that had handrails. I floated away every time we bumped. So, our technique was to bump then Nichole would pull me back over and we would try again. This will be a treasured memory for me!"
Roscosmos (Russia) Flight Engineers: Kirill Peskov, Sergey Ryzhikov, Alexey Zubritskiy
https://www.nasa.gov/iss-science
Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM)
Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center
Release Date: May 9, 2025
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