Every photograph

Two stars sit in a tight orbit at the centre. The fainter one has been throwing off these shells for thousands of years.

The tallest peaks along this edge are about seven light years high.

The Great Red Spot comes out white here. It reflects so much sunlight that it shines like the brightest clouds.

Two of its 35 fasteners would not come off until the team made new tools for them.

A day earlier this spacecraft had made the first rendezvous in space.

The first crew would not ride a Gemini home for almost three years.

About 6,000 people spent the night on this one beach so as not to miss the first Space Shuttle launch.

Viking 1 leaving for Mars at twenty two minutes past five in the afternoon, seen across the Florida scrub.

It was built for seven days of work on Mars. It was still sending data on the eighty third.

In a pocket of that suit was a corned beef sandwich, carried aboard without permission.

Both crews were aboard the shuttle. The two photographers were outside in a Soyuz.

Two months later the same three men flew to Skylab and had to repair it before they could live in it.

The gun in his hand fired compressed oxygen to steer him. It ran dry after about three of those minutes.

The two pale figures on the wall are Armstrong and Aldrin, live from the lunar surface.

Nobody is in the frame, only the car the crew drove across the valley.

Nine months later the crew passed about 4,067 miles above the real one.

Nobody saw it in 1993. It sat inside the photograph for months before anyone noticed.

Six days earlier it had flown through the outer atmosphere of the Sun. Nobody expected it to come out the other side.

Chris Cassidy aiming a Nikon at Luca Parmitano, who was aiming one at him. Soon afterwards Parmitano's helmet began filling with water.

Columbia was the first shuttle ever to reach space. This was the twenty eighth time she left the pad.

The trolley at the left runs on rails along the truss. Spacewalkers push it by hand.

Everything in that bay was about to be carried across to a Russian station.

Ingenuity was built for up to five flights. This was the fifty fourth.

Falcon came down with its rear footpad in a crater. Scott said afterwards that it was just where he wanted to land.

Three days after landing, Viking 1 turned its camera on its own deck and the plain beyond it.

Cernan is at the Rover, fetching a jack. He had drilled a core into the ground and it would not come back out.

‘Shoot. I thought I was going to get to drive,’ said Harrison Schmitt, as Gene Cernan climbed onto the rover for its first test.

The boulder's overhang had kept a patch of soil in shadow. Charlie Duke reached in and called it a perfect shadowed soil sample.

‘I'm going to run on out and look at some of these angular ones out here,’ Charlie Duke told John Young, and went.

As John Young turned with the camera, Charlie Duke told him, ‘John, you are just beautiful.’ Houston said it had never heard John described that way.

The butte stands about twenty feet high. Everything that once surrounded it has eroded away.

It pointed at the ground. Twenty seconds of scan lines, and one of the lander's own feet.

NASA posts Juno's raw frames online. A member of the public turned this one into a photograph.

Cassini sat in Saturn's shadow for four hours. Earth is the blue point out to the right of the rings.

More than thirty separate jets. Twenty of them had never been identified before this photograph.

The bright arc on the left is a single galaxy behind the cluster, bent by gravity into three separate images of itself.

A spire of cold gas standing out of the Eagle Nebula, about twice as long as the gap between the Sun and its nearest neighbouring star.

Scott is standing in the command module hatch, in vacuum. The man photographing him is outside as well, on the porch of the lunar module, with his own hatch open behind him.

Gordon Cooper flew twenty two orbits by himself. No American has been launched alone into orbit since.

NASA's B-52 flew eight of these deployments in one summer, at 160 to 230 miles an hour.

Six television cameras in the tower, sending images back until the moment of impact.

Before Friendship 7 flew, John Glenn asked for her to check the computer's numbers by hand.

The tunnel could drive air past a model at more than four times the speed of sound.

John Houbolt went over the heads of his own superiors to argue for this plan. It is how Apollo got there.

Its face was made to char and wear away, carrying the heat of entry off with it.

Virginia Norwood's scanner, bolted into the back of a truck, on an eleven day loop through six test sites.

Orion under its canopies, touching down in the Pacific off San Diego.

The rocket stood still. The tower beside it was recorded again and again on the same sheet of film as it swung away.

The hatch carried explosive escape bolts. Sealing it was still handwork.

Made through the largest telescope in the United States, and already altered by hand.