Greetings from the Moon
Astronauts change photojournalism—and photography changes them
By Mary Ann Hogan, Special to the Newseum "The moon is made of green cheese." "Magnificent desolation."
-- John Heywood (c. 1497-1580)
-- Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11, 1969
SPACE, 1969 -- It's a perfect day, as days on the moon go, and Neil Armstrong, first human ever to step there, is doing what anyone would do. He's taking pictures.
Houston: Neil, this is Houston. Did you copy about the contingency sample? Over.
Armstrong: Roger. I'm going to get that just as soon as I finish these pictures.
Typical tourist. Never mind the soil sample, just let me get one more shot here ...
Just before history's first lunar landing, Armstrong's wife offers this advice: "Be descriptive, Neil."
It has a stark beauty all its own, Armstrong finally reports. It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here.
The pictures will prove it.
Houston: Roger. Out.
At first, NASA doesn't place high priority on photography. "They had a memo out that said: ‘If an astronaut desires, he may carry a camera with him,' " Gemini 5's Gordon Cooper says. That changes.
If there is a turning point, it may be the series of 1965 images taken by Gemini 4's James McDivitt, showing fellow astronaut Ed White floating freeform in space, light as thistledown—is that the Earth below him?—connected to the micro-universe of his spacecraft by a mere tether. These are the first spacewalk photos ever shot, and the first NASA photos to be devoured by the worldwide press. And so, by the world.
Imagine: Kodak moments in space. Pictures from a place where no camera has gone before.
By 1968, when the first of the 11 Apollo missions takes off, NASA has a bustling photo department, even importing photojournalists from National Geographic and Life to coach their astronaut-photographers.
Each moon mission is more photographically sophisticated than the last. The camera lets the pilot-explorers show rather than tell. "We were engineers and pilots," Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan has explained, "and the world was getting a bit tired of hearing us say ‘beautiful' and ‘gee whiz,' although I believe it would have been equally difficult for poet or plumber to explain such sights."
So, fellas, what does it really look like out there? What do you really see? Be descriptive.
Cernan, the last human to leave the moon behind, puts it like this: "You can call it 'the universe,' but it's the infinity of space and the infinity of time. I'm looking at something called space that has no end and at time that has no meaning ... Now that's very difficult to conceive, I know. But that infinity of space and that infinity of time does exist because I've seen it with my own eyes."
And he's recorded it with his own camera.
And he, Armstrong and a select group of fellow astronauts have brought back the pictures to show us, yes, I've seen it with my own eyes. Science analyzes the photos. NASA assigns each one a cryptic label, AS11-40-5914 ... AS11-40-5915 ... And now, some 30 years later, the rest of us can see just how those photos have altered what we know and how we imagine.
Imagine: Real-life images of us, and surrounding atmosphere.
A postcard-perfect earthrise.
Vistas from a place we once called heaven.
Unimaginable.
If Proust is right —if art brings us to "landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon"—then astronaut photography is nothing if not art. The pictures offer layers upon layers of answers to questions we have entertained since long before the time of Greek mythology's Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, scorched his wings, and tumbled into the sea.
What is it like up there? What do you see? Be descriptive.
Apollo 12 air-to-ground transmission: Al, can you find the Earth? Where's the Earth? Oh, there it is. I can see it. Hello there, Earth.
The astronauts, fighter-pilots-turned explorers, have seen the sun and the moon and our place in the universe, seen it with their own eyes. And by recording it with their cameras, they become unwitting photojournalists, as pioneering in their way as the Civil War artists more than a century ago, who first brought the unthinkable home in photos.
Image. Man in spacesuit out for a spacewalk, with Earth backdrop. Astronaut commentary: "Rather impressive."
Image. The whole Earth hanging in sky. Astronaut commentary: "Waters are all sort of a royal blue. Clouds, of course, are bright white."
Image. The moon itself, subject of centuries of philosophy and fancy. Air-to-ground transmission: "That crater is ... that crater is, by golly, a rather steep crater ..."
Image. Man in spacesuit with American flag on surface of the moon, with Earth rising. " ... a beautiful picture here."
Unimaginable.
Houston: You guys resting?
Pete Conrad: Yeah we're resting.
But they're not really resting. Apollo 12's Charles "Pete" Conrad and Alan Bean are stalling—walking slowly back to the lunar module, hoping for a chance to shoot the "impossible photo" they've been secretly planning.
They want to mount the camera on a stick, set the remote timer they smuggled on board the spacecraft, and snap a picture of the two of them, the only humans in existence on the moon at the time, standing side by side.
"That would obviously be the picture (NASA) would grab and send out to the world," Conrad says in an interview years later, "until some smart guy asked, ‘Who took that picture?' "
But they can't find the timer. And Houston wants them back at the Lunar Module, pronto. The Impossible Photo never gets taken.
It's the second photographic mishap for Apollo 12. The other: As Bean pulls his TV camera into position, he accidentally points it into the sun and burns out the lens, depriving the world of the first TV moon shots with colorfilm.
Bean, an artist as well, is haunted by the loss and makes up for it by painting color moon scenes. Among his most famous: The impossible image, two explorers, side by side on the moon, with nobody else to witness the scene but the stars.
Imagine.
Astronaut photojournalism gets its start with a February 20, 1962, sunrise and sunset. Four of them, in fact, in one day.
On that day, John Glenn becomes the first American (the second human) to orbit Earth. He also becomes the first still photographer in space, armed with a 35 mm "rangefinder" he bought for the trip from a Florida beachfront drugstore.
He is first in a decade-long line of pilot-explorers who set out to document science, and who come home with documents that inspire existential inquiry and global humility.
Except when they drop the camera. Which happens twice. The camera in question both times is a specially outfitted 70 mm Hasselblad, the space camera of choice. Apollo veteran Cernan, on his June 1966 Gemini 9 mission, is climbing in after his spacewalk, and kicks the camera Thomas Stafford used to shoot his adventure. Cernan dives for it. But the camera bounces away.
A month later, on Gemini 10, Michael Collins (of Apollo 11 fame) discovers that the camera stuck in a slot on his chest pack has broken free of its tether and floated off into space, carrying his wide angles of Gemini, Earth and Agena.
As far as anyone knows, the cameras are still in orbit.
Air-to-ground transmission: "The Earth is now passing through my window. It's about as big as the end of my thumb ... "
The real significance of astronaut photography becomes clear when the world sees the first images of the whole Earth. Date: December 1968. Mission: Apollo 8, first manned space mission to enter lunar orbit.
"We were fighter pilots and test pilots out to do a job," as mission LM pilot William Anders puts it. "But all of us either transcended that or were jerked out of it by the view of the Earth as a sphere about the size of your fist at the end of your arm."
Apollo 15's Alfred Worden canonizes the whole Earth in poetry: "Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space ... " Earth scientists, ecologists, theologians even, seize upon the image as a tool to teach a new way of thinking.
Biologist Lewis Thomas, in his 1974 classic, The Lives of a Cell: "Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth ... is that it is alive ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun."
And Apollo 8's Anders begins his Christmas Eve message from that very vantage point in space like this: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth ... "
This millennium's final moon mission. Apollo 17, December 1972. They've got space photography down. Technically, the very last moon photos are ... galaxy class.
Incomparable lunar panoramas.
A crescent earthrise behind scalloped lunar surface that would make Michaelangelo weep.
Mission commander Eugene Cernan, among the most poetically minded of astronauts, captures the mood of the entire operation: "As I stood in sunshine on this barren world somewhere in the universe, looking up at the cobalt
Earth immersed in infinite blackness, I knew science had met its match."
But then, like the rest of us, they're still tourist snap-shooters at heart.
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt: Let me get the focus right ... All right. I got you reaching for the flag.
Cernan: How's that?
Schmitt: That's good, Gene ... That's beautiful.
Cernan: This has got to be one of the most proud moments of my life ...
Houston: Roger, 17 ... we thank you very much.
Mary Ann Hogan is a Virginia-based writing coach and story consultant.
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