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The Morning GIF: Spaceball

One Japanese astronaut took to playing baseball during his time in the International Space Station.

 

Lorraine Murphy

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Posted on Aug 9, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 1:08 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Play ball! Are those not two of the sweetest words in the English language? Want to know how to make them better (really, anything better)? Add “in SPACE!”

Surely an American pastime, you’d think. You’d be wrong.

Japan is at least as baseball-crazy as the U.S., and JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa invented solitaire spaceball during his 2011 stint in the International Space Station. Video of the historic event made ABC’s Play of the Day, from which this GIF was taken.

It’s made it to College Humor’s roundup of 12 Best Zero Gravity GIFS to celebrate the Mars landing, because NASA made sure all the GIFs featuring actual Martians are still classified (kidding).

Before you protest that a scientist’s time should be better spent, realize that he was up there from June 7 to Nov. 21, and in space the nights are endless.

For the record, he fouled and caught himself out. But he wins anyway.

Unrecorded

 

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*First Published: Aug 9, 2012, 7:30 am CDT