Friday, February 20, 2009

The NASA Project

I am pretty excited about a new project. One that will take me out from behind lens for a little while. With the blessing of NASA and in fact as this is their Fiftieth Anniversary one they have encouraged me to undertake. I am restoring images from the 1959-1960 Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Space Program.

I have to give NASA a lot of credit they documented and photographed everything. The mountains of information so far is just amazing. From crew selection, to training, equipment development and mission reports that are hundreds and hundreds of pages long.

The most difficult part I think of the whole project I believe will be in bringing all of this material together into one cohesive bundle and yet still keep it an engrossing and entertaining read. The tendency for people to simply skim the surface, to hold their attention, to make it compelling this will be the real task.

We seem to have almost evolved into a society where brief visual stimulation has replaced intellectual curiosity. In short many people really don’t read anymore. It takes too much of their valuable time, “Why should I read the book when I can just see the movie” type of thought process.

The story of the so called “Space Race” was personified as one of “Good vs Evil” and was made possible by more than just the Astronauts that piloted these rockets beyond our earthly confines. It took engineers, machinists, carpenters, masons and seamstresses. The Apollo Space suit alone had twenty seven layers of insinuation! It took the work, and in some cases the lives, of more than four hundred thousand Americans for Neil Armstrong to take that first small step.

It was a time when we learned by trial and error and it opened the door to so many of the technological advances we have today. What I find most saddening is that the program waned and faded not because of failure but because people simply lost interest. Sending a man to the moon was with in just a few short months of Apollo 11's landing to be something almost common place.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance and kindness of NASA for the information and images you will be viewing in the coming months. A time when man reached for the stars.

David




Earth Rise...Taken by Apollo 8, 24 December 1968.