Can You Play Pokemon Go in Space? Here's What NASA Has to Say

The International Space Station (ISS) is filled with all things related to technology but astronauts cannot play the famous smartphone game, Pokemon Go.

Yup, astronauts will have to wait for their rendezvous with Earth before they can catch their favorite Pokemon character despite having GPS equipment, Internet access and high-tech smartphones and computers in space.

Pokemon is an augment reality game, a spinoff of the famous 1990 cartoon TV show "Pokemon." Anyone with Internet access and smartphone can download the game for free. To play the game, the player will have to move and walk to search Pokemon's strategically placed in real accessible locations. This explains why people are suddenly stopping their cars in the middle of the road or start frequenting random places that turned out to be Pokemon or pokeballs hub.

The game uses the phone's GPS to detect the player's location to decide where to put the Pokemons in the game; to catch them the player will have to go where the Pokemon appears, according to VOX.

"Catch them all" is the tagline of the popular game. Twitter users have recently bombarded NASA by asking the agency if astronauts in space can play the game. After much prodding, NASA was forced to an answer, albeit disappointing.

"Unfortunately, no. There are smartphones, but the crew only uses them for @ISS_Research and they don't have Internet," a NASA official said in a tweet.

NASA further explains that although astronauts aboard the ISS have smartphones, its only used for science and their Internet access is also limited to the computers. But despite that, a lot of people are dreaming of playing Pokemon Go in space. Can you imagine how Pokemon Go screens look like in space? The Verge got that covered.

"They also only have access to apps specifically for the payloads they are intended for," Dan Huot, NASA spokesperson said in a statement published by TechTimes.

Astronauts in space also cannot download apps like how people on Earth do, but who needs apps when space is your playground? Besides, the carefully chosen crew are in space for science and any distraction to their mission can affect experiments that will then influence lives of many.