It Cost Over $130,000 to Get This $23,000 Camera Kit to the International Space Station
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YouTube Screenshot/NASA
Talk about shipping fees...
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station enjoy great views of Earth, and we often get to enjoy those views secondhand via the photos they take.
And it's not like they're up there with smartphones, either.
Last year, the International Space Station received 10 Nikon D5's to serve as their primary cameras.
There's plenty of awesome lenses for their cameras, too.
That includes the Nikon 800mm f/5.6E with a 1.4x teleconverter you see attached to the D5 in the image above.
One of the few times during this mission when I was nervous, and Sergey afraid. / Einige der wenigen Momente während dieser Mission, in dem ich nervös war, und Sergey Angst hatte. @roscosmos #Horizons pic.twitter.com/9QSJE5tEzt
— Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex) November 10, 2018
That kit costs roughly $23,000, so it's not like it's cheap.
But the shipping costs to get the kit to the ISS was even more - over $130,000.
A Redditor by the name of ultrahello pointed out recently that it costs $10,000 per pound to make deliveries to the ISS.
With a total weight of 13.61 pounds, that's how we arrive at the $130,000 shipping cost for this kit. Yikes!
This all came to light this past weekend because German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst Tweeted out a couple of photos of him giving his Russian cosmonaut pal Sergey Prokopyev a haircut.
The haircut went down in the Zvezda Service Module, which is where the astronauts' camera gear is stored on the walls.
For a look at some of the gear that NASA's astronauts use to take photos, have a look at the video above, captured from a live stream done a couple of years ago.
As a photographer, it's cool to think that in addition to all the astronaut things these guys and gals have to train for, that they also learn how to use camera gear in order to take awesome photos of Earth.
If we think photography is hard to master down here, just imagine what it's like way up there!
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Via PetaPixel