FRAMING
HISTORY
Apollo’s astronauts
captured images
that remain icons
of the Space Age.
BY ERNIE MASTROIANNILike anyone embarking on an exotic trip,
astronaut John Glenn wanted to take
photos of his upcoming journey in 1962.
None of NASA’s equipment was really
designed for making pretty pictures,
though, so Glenn bought a drugstore
camera and got some technicians to
modify it for orbit. The dozen or so
pictures he took showed the curvature
of Earth, the blackness of space and a
spectacular sunset.
A few missions later, when Wally
Schirra blasted into a six-orbit flight, he
took along his own camera, an expensive
Swedish-made Hasselblad, favored by
wedding and magazine photographers
at the time. Gordon Cooper took the
same camera on his 1963 spaceflight.
The photos they captured had razor-
sharp views of our home planet and the
cosmos. Soon after, many astronauts
started using the company’s cameras,
creating a record of stunning images.^ D48 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
NASA(^6)T O T H E MOON AND BACK
Wally Schirra inspects a camera during training. He used
his personal Hasselblad on his Mercury flight in 1962.Apollo 12’s Alan Bean holds a container of lunar soil in November 1969. Attached to his
spacesuit is a modified Hasselblad camera, held in place with a chest bracket.