It has been decades since I have last seen one of these. For a while they were the strap-on camera for every adventurer and adrenaline head that wanted to show everyone else just how crazy they were. Then direct optic recording became available, and the company when belly up. That happened maybe five years before the lunar colony was established. When I was about twelve.
I take it back to my LRV and scrounge an old USB connection. When I plug it in, none of the lights on it come on, but my interface hub recognizes it and can still read the data files. I sort by date, newest to oldest. The last recording is three hundred and twenty-two minutes long. I start it up and feed it to my eyes.
The quality is moderate at best. The resolution is there, but you notice compression artifacts more when they are fed directly to your eyes. Also, decades of solar radiation have corrupted some of the memory. The hub does its best to interpolate, but there is still some visual discrepancies.
The first image is of a green suburban lawn; something that hasn't been seen in almost as long as the camera. The camera angle is low. It is strapped to something sitting on the lawn. A figure steps into the frame. It is wearing a weird suit, something environmental or deep sea. There is a tank on the back. The figure turns around so that it is facing away from the camera and then sits on top of whatever the camera is strapped to. A minute or two later, the frame starts to move, jerky at first, as the camera (and presumably the figure) rise into the air. There is a brief glimpse of the ground as the angle pitches forward and a shadow can be seen before the weight is adjusted back. The shadow shows a large, semi-round blob above a smaller frame. There are what might be tubes strapped to the back of the frame and the figure sitting in it.
For the next one hundred and thirteen minutes, the camera ascends at a steady rate. Clouds move from above to below. The sky gets gradually darker, moving from light blue to indigo. The horizon takes on more curve. Then the speed of ascent seems to level out. It is hard to tell because there are no longer any close points of reference. There is a brief jerk, the camera pitches forward again and the sunlit earth can be seen below. It appears to be somewhere over Minnesota or Wisconsin given all of the lakes and ponds reflecting light, but that is only a guess.
Suddenly, the camera jerks again, this time much more violently. It is still pitched forward, looking down on the earth, but not as much. The limb of the earth is in the upper part of the frame. It starts to race over the ground at an increasing rate. The lakes streak past below to be replaced by one of the great lakes. Michigan, I think. Earth geography is no longer a strong point for me.
The speed continues to increase for the next ten minutes and the altitude, judged by the horizon, increases as well. At the end of the time, the ground below is racing at a fantastic rate. Then there is another jerk and two long, silver tubes briefly enter the bottom of the frame, tumbling towards the ground. The camera continues to climb for another twenty or so minutes. It passes over a coast line and then through the terminator in to the night side. At that point, it starts to descend, still travelling horizontally very quickly. But it does not descend all of the way. Instead, after another thirty minutes, it misses the Earth.
It rises and rises, ascending until the Earth is no longer a flat plane with a curved upper edge. Now it is a semi-circle filling the bottom of the frame. The camera continues to pull back and back and back. Now the Earth just a circle in the frame and it is still receding. This continues for the rest of the video before it finally cuts out, the earth a small marble against the black of space.
I unplug and suit up again to back outside. I retrace my steps to where I found the camera, but there is nothing there except the hiking trail and the scuff marks from where I had kicked the GoPro. No chair, no weirdly suited person. The camera is all that is left.
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