Video: A Two-Minute Visual History of the Spacewalk

There's something about the image of a human high above the Earth, clambering around on a piece of machinery whizzing through space

If there is a defining activity for NASA's Space Shuttle program, it is the spacewalk, or extra-vehicular activity. 160 spacewalks were made in the assembly of the ISS alone. There's something about the image, too, of a human high above the Earth, clambering around on a piece of machinery whizzing through space. In this video, we take a two-minute tour of the history of the EVA from the first during the Gemini program to the last spacewalk, which occurred Wednesday in low-earth orbit.

All footage is courtesy of NASA and the Internet Archive. Some of it has been sped up.