Watch: NASA Astronaut Climbs Out For Spacewalk, With Dizzying View Of Earth

Climbing out of the International Space Station can be a dizzying experience, as astronaut Randy Bresnik demonstrated when he posted a video of his recent spacewalk.

Spacewalks, also known as extravehicular activities, are trips outside the ISS that crew members take to perform maintenance and installations on the outside of the massive station’s capsules. Although there is hard work involved, the astronauts get breathtaking views of Earth as they hang over it, as the blackness of space’s great void looms behind them.

Bresnik pulled himself up and out of the space station during one of those spacewalks as a camera attached to his spacesuit was capturing every frame. He posted the recent footage on Twitter.

“Diving head-first into the vastness of space,” he wrote. “How spectacular is that view?”

Bresnik, the commander of NASA’s current expedition to the space station, has the nickname “Komrade,” and is one of six men currently on the ISS. He is joined by NASA’s Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei, as well as the European Space Agency’s Paolo Nespoli, and cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Sergey Ryazanskiy of Roscosmos. Bresnik launched to the space station in July.

Although they might be most strongly associated with space stations, spacewalks go back to the beginning days of space exploration.

In 1965, astronaut Ed White became the first American to go on a spacewalk while on a four-day Gemini 4 mission. He left a capsule he was piloting in orbit around the Earth and spent almost a half-hour floating above the planet while attached to his spacecraft by a 50-foot cord.

The first person to perform a spacewalk was Soviet cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov, who had stepped out into the vacuum in 1965, and stayed for a scary 12 minutes during the Voskhod 2 mission.