NASA astronauts hold their own Summer Olympics in space (video)

Excitement about the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics extends out into space.

The six NASA astronauts currently living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) held their own mini-Olympics to mark the start of the games, which are being held in Paris and other sites around France.

We get a glimpse at the spaceflyers’ lighthearted efforts in a two-minute video, which NASA released today (July 26).

NASA astronaut Suni Williams holds a mock torch aboard the International Space Station to celebrate the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics. (Image credit: NASA)

The action starts with the passing of an Olympic torch — a mock one, of course, as fires are a serious no-no on the ISS — from Jeanette Epps to Mike Barratt to Suni Williams to Tracy Caldwell Dyson, then finally to Butch Wilmore, who’s in the station’s Cupola, with Earth visible in the background.

The astronauts then gear up for their events. Epps and Williams shake out their arms, for example. Wilmore stretches his upper body, then hydrates — by sucking in a water globule floating near his head.

Related: Weightlessness and its effect on astronauts

The six NASA astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts currently aboard the ISS pose for a picture after Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams entered the station on June 6, 2024 during the still-ongoing Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test. (Image credit: NASA TV)

And then the orbital games begin. Barratt hurls a makeshift discus and Wilmore shotputs a ball of duct tape. Williams and Matthew Dominick (the sixth NASA astronaut living off-Earth at the moment) do some gymnastics, and Epps sprints down an ISS corridor. Caldwell Dyson does some powerlifting, raising a bar that Wilmore and Barratt are clutching off the “ground.”

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It’s all very playful, of course. But the astronauts capped things off by sending a sincere message to the athletes of the 23rd Olympiad.

“Over the past few days on the International Space Station, we’ve had an absolute blast pretending to be Olympic athletes,” Dominick says at the end of the video, with the other five NASA astronauts flanking him. 

“We, of course, have had the benefits of weightlessness,” he added. “We can’t imagine how hard this must be, to be such a world-class athlete doing your sports under actual gravity. So from all of us aboard the International Space Station to every single athlete in the Olympic Games, godspeed!”

The six NASA astronauts aren’t the only people living on the ISS at the moment; it also houses Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenken and Oleg Kononenko, who commands the orbiting lab’s current Expedition 71 mission.

All of these spaceflyers are serving the typical six-month ISS stint except Williams and Wilmore, who arrived aboard Boeing’s new Starliner capsule on June 6 for a planned weeklong stay. But Starliner’s time in orbit has been extended multiple times as engineers investigate thruster issues and helium leaks with the spacecraft. NASA and Boeing have not yet set a departure date for Starliner.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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