NASA is hosting the first Twitch stream from space and I'm already picturing the chat with equal parts fear and excitement
It's 2025 and somehow we've still yet to see a Twitch stream happening from space—until next week, that is. NASA has announced it'll be doing a livestream a whole 250 miles from Earth aboard the International Space Station, on Wednesday 12 February.
The stream will be happening on the official NASA Twitch and is set to feature astronauts like Don Pettit and Matt Dominick—my astronaut knowledge is appalling but they both have Wikipedia entries so I can only assume they're important based off that metric alone—with Twitch chat having the opportunity to ask all sorts of questions about what it's actually like being up in space.
Now the cynical part of me can't help but automatically go to the absolute worst-case scenario on how that Twitch chat is actually going to look. I can only assume it's going to go somewhat feral, and I do wonder if seasoned astronauts are ready to deal with an undiluted internet chatroom happening in real-time. I'm sure they'll have plenty to talk about regardless though, with NASA promising all sorts of insight into day-to-day life aboard the space station while spending a hefty amount of time plugging their various programmes and research.
NASA communications director Brittany Brown called it "the first of many" Twitch streams the government agency intends to do from the cosmos and you know what? Hell yeah. I'm all for cool stuff like this happening on social and streaming platforms, and I'm sure NASA has already calculated the positive exposure it'll have on their end.
It does perhaps spell bad news for the notorious streamer IShowSpeed, who just a couple of months ago had announced his grand ambitions to go live from space. "I want to stream in space one day," he told Forbes in December last year. "Once I talk to Elon Musk, it's happening."
I mean, I guess that's still a possibility, but I can't help but wonder if he'll be a bit miffed that he's not the first one to do it. I'd like to proclaim from my high horse that I wouldn't be, but I probably would. Especially if I'd just so happened to very recently proclaim my desires to stream from space, only to have Big Space itself do it first.
Regardless, it's an exciting concept. It might be far more boring in practice than I'm building it up in my head to be. But hey, it's a first, and that's pretty neat. The event is set to kick off at 8:45am PT / 11:45am ET / 4:45pm GMT on February 12.