The electric motor in these Hasselblads largely automated the picture taking process. On Apollo 8, Hasselblad EL electric cameras were used for the first time. Interest in ecology and the protection of the Earth's environment can be traced to these first missions to another world.
These new views of the Earth in space were an unforeseen revelation. Few sights in human history have been as exhilarating as that first Earthrise over the lunar horizon. On Apollo 8 human beings saw, with their own eyes, the Earth as a sphere in space. Two human missions, Apollos 8 and 10, orbited the Moon before the Apollo 11 landing. He used a Zeiss Contarex 35mm camera mounted atop his gas-powered maneuvering gun. In addition to the Hasselblads, on the second Gemini mission, history was made when the first picture of a spacecraft in orbit was taken by astronaut Ed White as he floated outside his spacecraft. In addition to the excellent mechanical and optical properties of the cameras and their Zeiss lenses, the cameras were relatively simple to use, and film was pre-loaded into magazines that could easily be interchanged in mid-roll when lighting situations changed. The Hasselblads proved the mainstay of the early space program and were used throughout the Gemini two-man spaceflights in 19. Unmodified Hasselblad 550C medium format cameras were first used on the last two Mercury one-man missions in 19. After processing, the film was scanned for radio transmission of the pictures back to Earth. These spacecraft carried fully automated film processing laboratories.
Then Lunar Orbiters methodically mapped much of the Moon, examining the candidate sites for manned landings. Beginning in 1966, the probes dug, analyzed, and transmitted pictures from the same height an astronaut would see as he was standing there. Next, Surveyor probes landed softly on the surface. The first photographs from the Moon came in 1964 when Ranger 7 radioed photographs back as it plunged into the lunar surface, crashing and being destroyed in the process. Nearly 100,000 photographs taken by NASA's lunar probes, Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter, helped to map Apollo's landing sites. Satellites took over many of the intelligence gathering responsibilities that aircraft such as the high-flying U-2 previously provided. In the first decade of the space program, satellites were orbited for Earth resources and for mapping. Weather satellites permitted weather predictions as never before, saving lives and billions of dollars. Not only was little expected of those first pictures taken from space, but there was serious concern that taking pictures of other nations from orbit would be seen as an act of ill will and even one of war, as sovereign and sensitive nations might resent having pictures taken from orbit. Photography was deemed nothing more than a recreational extra. At the beginning of the program, no one knew for certain whether weightlessness would prevent a man from seeing, or from breathing, or from eating and swallowing. At the time, everything that John Glenn did was deemed an experiment. An Ansco Autoset 35mm camera, manufactured by Minolta, was purchased in a local drug store and hastily modified so the astronaut could use it more easily while in his pressure suit. When John Glenn became the first American in orbit, bringing a camera was an afterthought. There were pictures of the spaceships, and launches, and of astronauts in training, but these were all pictures taken on the ground. Astronaut Still Photography During ApolloĪt the beginning of the space program hardly anyone thought of photographs from space as anything more than a branch of industrial photography.
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