What do you do when nobody is around to take your picture? You take a selfie. Self-portraits, a.k.a. Selfies, have a long history in the art world, and with the rise of smartphones, selfies captured by cameras rather than painted pictures have become increasingly popular. Since 2014, the United States has celebrated June 21 as National Selfie Day to honour this distinctive style of high-tech self-portraiture.
Photographic self-portraits have existed for as long as cameras have been in human hands. But what about selfies in space? On Twitter, a few years back, NASA astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, who famously became the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969, laid claim to a spaceflight first: taking 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, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to Levasseur, the concept of a selfie is directly linked to internet culture and the human desire to interact on social platforms. “The thing that makes a selfie 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. In 1966, Aldrin used a Hasselblad camera explicitly designed for space, with an extra-large trigger to accommodate the astronaut’s thick gloves. Hasselblad also painted the first camera in space a matte black to minimise reflections in the orbiter window. But cameras used in space need to survive extreme conditions, like temperature swings from -149° to 248°F, so Hasselblad painted later models silver to help the camera adjust to these temperature changes.
Today, astronauts also have access to the internet and social platforms in space and can post true space selfies made using digital cameras covered with thermal blankets. 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 daily, Levasseur says. The first astronaut selfie that went viral on the internet was the one by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide in 2012.
Similarly, space robots also participate in selfie culture, capturing remote images of themselves in space or on other planets and beaming them back to Earth. For instance, in January, the Mars rover Curiosity “shared” a selfie made from a mosaic of images captured at the rover’s latest drill site on the red planet.