You can now explore the Space Station in Google Street View

For the first time ever, you can venture beyond our planet in Google Maps’ Street View – with the option to visit the International Space Station.

Astronauts on the station helped to capture the 360-degree panoramas inside the 15 ISS modules – and views down to our planet 200 miles below.

Due to the difficulty of getting Google’s normal Street View cameras into orbit, astronauts captured the scenes using SLR cameras.

The photos feature pop-up text descriptions – a new departure for Google’s Street View.

Project manager Alice Lieu told the BBC, ‘Typically, to stitch panoramic images we take a camera and mount it on a fixed mount and rotate it around.

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‘In space there were no tripods, so we ended up using a really simple set-up: a pair of bungee cords strapped in the module in a criss-cross fashion, so that the crossing point defined the centre of where the camera needed to be.

‘The astronauts had to take the pictures at the defined angles and float around the camera to complete the set of images.

‘That is an engineering marvel that people should care about and know about.’