NASA has plenty of vacuum chambers that they can control the pressure and temperature. They even tested the entire JWST hardware in a massive vacuum chamber.

heck I have a vacuum chamber on my desk at home, though not one as good as the NASA ones

Here is the entire Orion spacecraft being put in one NASA's vacuum chambers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G99L5RRjEKA

It seems likely that a lot of industrial grade hardware would work just fine in space, needing at most minor tweaks, especially for operating periods of weeks/months at most. Government contracting is just too used to the old model of burning billions on redesigning everything (because, of course, jobs). They've only barely gotten over that model for rocketry in general.

For instance, the footage on Perseverance's landing was also all from off-the-shelf hardware. The Ingenuity helicopter is also largely off-the-shelf gear, it uses a plain old Snapdragon 801 as its main processor running Linux. Perseverance also uses an Intel Atom processor (although it carries 2) to receive footage from all the cameras and compress them, compared to the main processor, which is an ancient PowerPC chip. IIRC there was also a cubesat which used a smartphone as its processor and several others which have used Raspberry Pis. A GoPro has also been to space earlier this year.

SpaceX actually has used them on a bunch of Falcon 9 launches. But I'd worry about how well a GoPro would survive in the long run in the harsh radiation environment outside the Van Allen belts.

Space is inhospitable for humans, but not so bad for tech. With no need for a cushy room-temperature, you mostly need to think about increased radiation and temperature swings.

I can't find details on NASA's designs, but I suspect you'd mostly need a new casing. Something radiation-tolerant (most plastic degrades quickly) and maybe radiation-shielding if it messes with the electronics too much. For temperature you could just run it through a few cycles on Earth and see what breaks. Probably nothing, given the GoPro's lack of moving parts and general ruggedness.

The rugged, icy, salt-water environments the GoPro is designed for are, in many ways, a lot more demanding than space.

My GoPro won't work if it's too cold (lithium battery).

They're using GoPro 4's, which is somewhat interesting, as the 11 just came out. So, old tech (8 years old or so) that's been heavily modified to work in space. I'm reminded some janky PowerPC powers the FORTRAN code that runs the Hubble.

It is romantic to think that the Earthrise photo was taken with a Hasselblad medium format camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4

All space hardware is old since it has to be radiation-proof and proven reliable above all else.

It seems unlikely that the GoPros in question are rad-hard (there is no rad-hard GoPro that I'm aware of); it's more likely that they chose them for some other reason (perhaps some sort of validation or testing), or that these have fewer heat dissipation issues than the newer models. Heat dissipation is a frequent cause of issues for electronics in space.

They are old because the design was locked long before launch.

If they found new cameras with better heat dissipation, they would still go with old ones, otherwise they would have to recertify the new ones, which would take ages.

It's sort of fun to think, since in the Apollo missions, this certainly wasn't the case.

To add to that - vacuum can also mess up sealed components that were manufactured at 1ATM. This is mostly a problem with electrolytic batteries and capacitors which puff up when the atmospheric pressure is removed. For batteries mitigations include manufacturing at low pressures or constraining the expansion mechanically.

Pretty sure a GoPro underwater housing would be perfectly capable of maintaining 1ATM in space. They are designed to handle many times that in external pressure.

The 1atm in space is pushing in the opposite direction. But yeah, if it's good to 5atm in pressure odds are it's good to 1atm in vacuum

The main issue is radiation from the sun and I guess the rest of space. This paper will give you a very nice idea of all the issues with COTS in space: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...