Amazed astronaut in SpaceX Capsule shoots the video of our planet

Look that.

NASA astronaut Victor Glover exploded in Earth’s orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon ship last week. Shortly thereafter, Glover and three other astronauts safely docked at the International Space Station.

Glover, the first black astronaut scheduled for an extended six-month stay on the space station, recently tweeted its inaugural video from the aircraft that ferried it into orbit, some 250 miles above the Earth.

The shot shows an observation point of the Earth in the black void of space. We can spy on the blue trace of the planet’s thin atmosphere and a swirling weather system curling over the ocean. The hum of the space station swirls in the background. Of course, the scene is even more touching in person.

“Looking at the Earth through the Dragon Resilience window,” Glover wrote. “The scale of the details and the sensory inputs made this perspective breathtaking!”

Glover’s mission, called SpaceX Crew-1, is the first “operational” flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, meaning the first time the SpaceX capsule is used in an active mission, rather than in a test. Previously, SpaceX made history in May, when the space exploration company became the first commercial company to send astronauts into Earth’s orbit.

Now in space, Glover can regularly scan our humble blue planet, a perspective that often changes the way astronauts view the world and the delicate life in it. It’s called the “panoramic effect”.

Edgar Mitchell, a NASA astronaut who walked on the moon, said: “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles and say, ‘Look, you son of a bitch.'”