NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman made a pioneering small step in social media Friday when he sent the first Vine video shot in space out to his Twitter followers. The brief time-lapse video went out with text proclaiming “1st Vine from space! Single Earth orbit. Sun never sets flying parallel w/terminator line.” The video tweeted by Wiseman was retweeted over 2,500 times withing a couple of hours by his followers. Weisman was part of a three-man crew that arrived at the International Space Station last week on May 29 following a flawless launch.
Astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this Vine shot from an observation window on the International Space Station this week. It shows one full orbit of the ISS around planet earth. It’s the first Vine recorded from outer space, and it’s literally out of this world. Reid is following in a great tradition of outer-space social media here: Col. Chris Hadfield was a prolific tweeter during his ISS missions, and Astronaut Mike Massinimo sent the first tweet from space all the way back in 2009. But there’s something particularly awe-instilling about seeing the ISS’s orbital path so vividly. As Reid’s caption explains, the sun never sets on this 90-minute orbit because the ISS is traveling along the terminator line, the border between light and darkness on the face of the earth.
