Play

February 6 was an important day for human beings with regard to space. Not only did Elon Musk finally launch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, but also, for the first time, video footage showed a sport being played in the great beyond.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station decided to go big and held a one-of-a-kind zero-gravity space badminton tournament. Russian and American astronauts competed in a doubles badminton match that was very entertaining to say the least, as you can see in the video above.

Of course, the astronauts had to set up their own set of space rules, quite different from the ones on earth. That’s also the reason why the teams decided to keep things friendly, claiming that “friendship won” at the end of the day.

Russian astronaut Alexander Misurkin, who happens to be an actual badminton champion back home, was so proud of the achievement that he said the outer space badminton game was “tantamount to placing a flag on Mars”. Turns out the actual badminton game was played on January 1, though the video was only recently released by the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

If you enjoyed the video above, you can watch the badminton match in 3D 360-degree vision below:

Play