Some Nasa Nikon Cameras Trivia

Today I want to share some obscure NASA trivia because I feel depressed, and when I’m depressed I like to rummage around online archives like Archive.org and go into deep dives about obscure stuff I find.
This time I was looking at some pictures that were taken during the STS missions, and I found this. This is a picture of Jim Voss with a Nikon F5
I remember reading somewhere that NASA was almost exclusively using Nikon cameras and lenses for their spaceflight missions. They used the original F on the Apollo missions, a heavily modified F3 for some later missions, and then the F4 and F5 for the STS ones. Interestingly enough, the F4 didn’t need to be modified as heavily as the Nikon F3 to make it space-worthy, since Nikon used many of the modifications put into the F3 in their F4 consumer models by default. Similarly with the F5. If you were some consumer in the 1990s you could basically buy a NASA-approved, space-worthy camera at some random B&H or Walmart, which I find neat to think about.

Now why am I writing this? Well, if you’ve seen me around the ETH (or anywhere else for that matter) you’ve most likely seen me walk around with some camera. That camera being the F4. (I also own an F5, but I almost never bring it with me because it’s bulky). Anyway, I feel cool owning space cameras :] Oh, and I also remember reading that on one EVA mission a Nikon F5 detached from a spacesuit when some screw backed out, and the camera floated off into the universe, never to be seen again.
The only thing that will remain of humanity (if it goes extinct) is the Voyager golden record and some random Nikon F5 floating in space…