American Scientist

The NASA Archives: 60 Years in Space. Piers Bizony, with essays by Andrew Chaikin and Roger Launius. 2019. 468 pp. Taschen, $150.

"Seeing is believing” is such a truism that it was already a cliché in the second century BCE, when the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus planted those words in his comedy Truculentus. The saying has stuck with us, because the human imagination is puny compared with the vastness of our experience and our potential. The triumphs of the Space Age are perhaps the greatest illustrations of this gap. Fewer than a dozen years passed between the founding of NASA and the Apollo 11 Moon landing on July 20, 1969. It was an achievement that still staggers the imagination—one so extraordinary that a community of internet trolls thrives on the notion that the Moon shot must have been a hoax because believing that it actually happened is so difficult.

The NASA Archives matches the magnitude of America’s triumphs with some heft of its own: Its 468 oversize pages, which feature more than 400 photographs and illustrations, add up to a bicep-building 4.5-kilogram epic. Its narrative begins, fittingly, with the stirring launch scene from Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, and ends with a quote from Apollo 16 astronaut Ken Mattingly: “I don’t think people can understand the exhilarating feeling of being a part of that kind of endeavor, unless you’ve been there.”

The pages in between do their best to prove Mattingly wrong. You have surely seen the famous “first man on the Moon” photograph (which actually shows Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong), but not the way you see it here. It looks different, not only because of the gorgeous, large-scale format, but also because of the expansive visual history around it. Although the book includes commentary by journalist Piers Bizony, along with sharp essays by NASA historian Roger Launius and veteran space writer Andrew Chaikin, the overwhelming emphasis here is on photography. Even dedicated space enthusiasts may be startled by what they see on these pages.

Every major stride in the American side of the space race is documented, reaching back into NASA’s earlier incarnation as NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Test pilot George Cooper, shown standing in a determined pose next to his F-100 Super Sabre in 1957, prefigures the “right stuff” persona that NASA astronauts perfected in the 1960s. The enormous wind-tunnel complex at NACA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland establishes a template for the ever-larger hardware the agency developed through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

All of the expected NASA highlights are represented in the book, but often they are presented in revealing, sometimes radically unfamiliar ways. A stark photograph documents the first successful rendezvous between two spaceships—a critical, mostly forgotten milestone on the path toward the Moon—as the Gemini 6 capsule passed within 30 centimeters of Gemini 7 in 1965. The celebrated Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photograph is overshadowed by a glorious head-on view of the Apollo 10 command module (whimsically nicknamed “Charlie Brown”) hovering above the lunar surface, resembling a bullet fired from a land covered in gray gunpowder. And three years before striking his iconic pose during Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin took the first space selfie: Here you get to see him looking tense and very human as he strains to gaze into the camera during the Gemini 12 mission.

The NASA Archives is an unabashedly romantic version of the agency’s story. The deadly Apollo 1 fire that nearly derailed the entire Moon program merits just two pages. It’s also revealing that the 15 years from NASA’s birth in 1958 to the launch of Skylab in 1973 get considerably more coverage than the remaining 45 years of NASA history combined. And all of NASA’s robotic explorations are relegated to the final quarter of the book, where they are lumped incongruously with photos of rovers and rockets that have been designed for a possible future human expedition to Mars. In a frustrating lapse for an art-based book, the handful of photo credits provided are all crammed into a small corner of a page near the end; the only thing we learn about the vast majority of the book’s scientific images is that they appear courtesy of NASA.

All of which adds up to a peculiar paradox: Although The NASA Archives celebrates human space exploration, giving it much more attention than robotic probes, the book also fetishizes hardware. First and foremost, it measures the magnitude of NASA’s successes in the scale of the rockets and the machinery that it created.

That emphasis lends the book an undeniable grandeur in keeping with its own Brobdingnagian scale. The documentary photography on display here is tangible, gorgeous, startling, almost overwhelming. It simply leaves no room for disbelief. The NASA Archives makes the case that the American space agency built an infrastructure like nothing that had gone before, and used it to attain an unprecedented scope of exploration. In the end, though, the book is unavoidably poignant, because readers are left to wonder: Absent the pressure of an all-out Cold War, will we ever do anything like this again?

Related Content:

Moon Books