Every photograph

Anders had black and white film loaded. He called for colour, and Lovell found a roll before the Earth cleared the horizon.

The first close-up photographs of another planet showed craters, and this one now carries the spacecraft's name.

The walls were chilled with liquid nitrogen and lamps stood in for the Sun, so the rover could rehearse Mars in California.

The camera that took this was flying too, in an aircraft more than 35,000 feet above the Atlantic.

The seat was meant for Deke Slayton until a heart condition grounded him.

A few weeks before launch, the spacecraft bound for Saturn still stood uncovered on top of its rocket.

Two crews in space talked to each other, one circling Earth and one on its way home from the Moon.

For six months there were only two people on the station, and he was one of them.

In 1962 the camera was a Hasselblad any photographer could buy. In 2026 it was a phone.

The rings are a million times fainter than the planet. Webb caught both in the same frame.

The rocket hit the desert at speed and broke apart. The steel cassette in the nose did not.

The barber is Pete Conrad, the third man to walk on the Moon.

The robotic arm dug it by joining two trenches the team had named Dodo and Goldilocks.

The landing rockets blew the soil away, and the team nicknamed what they found Holy Cow.

Alan Bean's own shadow is in the frame, with Pete Conrad packing the rock box.

Thirteen frames, turned by hand on the rim of a crater on the Moon, make up this one view.

Discovery rolled a slow full circle below the station so that every tile could be photographed from above.

The first time one space station crew handed over to the next by shuttle.

Every shade is a different mineral. The bullseye is a basin 960 miles across.

Paul Scowen laid the separate frames out on a table, saw what they made, and telephoned Jeff Hester to come at once.

The same spacewalk, the camera pointed away from himself.

The suit on the mast is an early prototype for the Moon. The test article was called xGUS, after Gus Grissom.

The first photograph of Earth from lunar orbit, made more than two years before Apollo 8 saw Earthrise.

The command module America on the way back, with nothing left to do but get home.

‘This boulder's got its own little track,’ Schmitt said. It had come down the mountain and left a trail on the slope.

Anders on the left, Lovell in the middle, Borman reaching up to a switch. Six weeks after this they were the first people to orbit the Moon.

Built up one line at a time as the satellite spun, from 17,000 miles out.

The radio blackout ran longer than anyone had predicted, and Houston could only wait.

None of them had flown yet. Within four years, four of them would ride this rocket into orbit.

Sugar cookies baked on the ground were a favourite aboard, and some crews traded them like money.

The device pulled blood toward his legs, the way gravity does on Earth.

His first spacewalk, the next day, was called off after thirty three minutes of a planned hundred and seven.

Two months after the damage: a parasol over the workshop, the telescope mount turned to the Sun.

A dying star shedding its layers. The dark seam down the middle may be where material is being thrown out of the top and bottom.

The flight was meant to last three days. A misfiring thruster in orbit brought them home in less than eleven hours.

The telescopes were outside the station. The scientist aiming them from this panel had taught at Stanford.

The three astronauts were riding home in their lunar module. The people who would get them there were in this room.

He blew it through a straw. Surface tension did the rest.

Every day the crew get a list of places to photograph. Much of the best work is what they spot on their own.

The tall rig overhead is not the telescope. It was built to give the instruments the same kind of light Webb would.

The early bags tore on the stones. The answer was more layers of a fabric called Vectran.

To the eye, Venus is a blank pale disc. Only in ultraviolet do its clouds appear at all.

Sergei Krikalev made the flyaround photographs, three days after he and Bob Cabana opened the hatch and went in together.

Cernan went round to the front of the Rover to catch Schmitt jumping into his seat. ‘I got three of them that time.’

‘He's got the hammer out,’ Charlie Duke told Houston, and made this photograph of John Young walking over to a rock.

Less than an hour after the burn that sent them to the Moon, Ken Mattingly was telling Houston about ‘the reds in the desert down there’.

Scott told Houston he was cleaning up the back of the Rover. He was setting out a memorial to fourteen astronauts and cosmonauts who had died.

‘Look at the glass all over those rocks,’ Conrad said at Bench Crater. ‘I want to bring this back and look at it.’

Bean took this to record the ground before a sample was lifted. Conrad's tongs are already reaching in.

The metal staff in front held a foil sheet set out to trap particles streaming from the Sun, to be carried back to Earth.