You have until midnight to watch the best music video ever filmed in space. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's serene, soulful cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity comes off YouTube at the end of the day, a condition of Hadfield's agreement with Bowie's representatives. The video features the astronaut singing, floating around the International Space Station with his guitar, and some truly awe-inspiring shots of the ISS traveling high above the Earth's surface. Phrases like "here, am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world," have a pretty strong resonance when sung in that context; could there be a more literal interpretation of a song's subject?
Over at The Economist, there's a good explainer of the hypothetical copyright issues of singing in space, but we'll leave you with Hadfield's words from a post earlier today on Reddit. The video, he wrote, "helped show that humans have left Earth, and that the Space Station is a new stage, for not just science and exploration, but for our art and music too. With exploration comes insight—with perspective comes self-realization."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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