SIX OF THE BEST SPACE PRANKS

It turns out that the sky isn’t the limit when it comes to a good old-fashioned practical joke

-  Daisy Dobrijevic

UNAUTHORISED SPACEWALK 

If you’re going to pull off a prank in space, do it in style, while wearing a pair of cool shades. In 2010, NASA astronaut Timothy Creamer, Japanese astronaut Sôichi Noguchi and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov beamed a snapshot of themselves floating in space back to Mission Control for an April Fool’s Day prank. “You have a real problem, but you know it’s outside our capability to help you,” astronaut Shannon Lucid radioed the station crew, laughing all the way.

The astronauts reassured Mission Control, claiming they were wearing sunscreen and eye protection and were securely tethered so as not to float away. “We wanted to welcome you guys to April, and hopefully we brought you guys some smiles and not a lot of nervousness,” station astronaut Timothy Creamer of NASA told Mission Control. “You brought a lot of laughs, that’s for sure,” Lucid replied.

UNEXPECTED DELIVERY

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson pulled off an impressive prank on the International Space Station on 13 February 2017. Whitson packed herself into a cargo bag, enlisting the help of NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and the European Space Agency’s Thomas Pesquet to surprise their Russian crewmates, Andrei Borisenko, Sergey Ryzhikov and Oleg Novitskiy. “They were quite surprised when I popped out!” Whitson wrote in a Twitter post. Pesquet also tried to squeeze into the cargo bag, but unfortunately it didn’t quite work out. “I tried… but I didn’t fit!” Pesquet wrote on Twitter.