I’ve seen some of this footage before but never heard the commentary. The narrators go into some really interesting detail on the tech involved in capturing the film footage of Shuttle launches. Most of the footage is for review purposes but some is purely documentary. All of the footage is beautiful though. It amazed me that they still used film all the way up until the end of the Shuttle program. They’re also shooting at higher frame rates so you get some great slow motion in there.
The lenses used range all the way up to a 4000mm, 250lb., catadioptric for the medium range tracking system. The Shuttle program was undoubtedly one of the greatest technical achievements humankind will ever produce (and I’m guessing the last of it’s scale), so I suppose it’s fitting that it was documented with a 100+ camera array of some of the most sophisticated optics available.
This was part of a DVD put together detailing some of the best footage from the later Shuttle launches.
NASA has a great collection of historical photographs detailing their exploits over the years. Break out your Epsons and clean up your source imagery folder, these are all high-res and downloadable. Your tax dollars at work.
Model of the 1962 Republic Apollo LEM proposal. Loving the type on this. The bottom two images are concepts by competing manufacturers.
On July 25, 1962, NASA invited 11 firms to submit proposals for the LEM. Of the 11 invited, 9 submitted proposals. The firms that submitted proposals were Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Ling-Temco-Vought, Grumman, Douglas, General Dynamics, Republic, and Martin Marietta. Grumman was the winner. This model is owned by the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island NY.
A great PDF of Hasselblad’s the guidebook for the NASA Photography Training Program can be had here. The guide focuses on the operation of the 500 EL/M, which was the official NASA camera.
Sci-Fi-O-Rama has some gorgeous scans from Time-Life’s To the Moon, “an audio and visual chronology that documents NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and (of course) Apollo projects.” It includes 6 doubled sided vinyls of interviews and famous radio transmissions as well as a 190 page slip case book, which these scans come from.
Ah yes Outer Space, one of my favorite subjects. Ross Bernes does it justice here in his Under the Milky Way series. These have been floating around the blogosphere for some time, but I only recently discovered Mr. Berens and his many talents (and at such a young age!). As he mentions on his site, these were each done in 2-3 hours — I wonder what he could do with a whole day. I was also very impressed with the logo for his blog, NVSBLTY.
I’m still wrapping my head around how cool those videos were that Jakub posted yesterday. In a similar (but stylistically divergent) vein, these clips by Russian artist Maxim Zhestkov are stunning. He’s got a few videos on his Vimeo page, the rest you have the see on his site. If you click the thumbnails above, they will link to their corrosponding video. They all remind me of the Minus the Bear “Planet of Ice” album cover, if everything went completely crazy.
This series by Simon Page is great. I’m always a fan of this retro minimalist look. I think he does a great job making it feel aged without going overboard. The color and texture is spot on and the vintage feel is skillfully conjured. Sounded like what started as a personal project turned into a successful client job after they saw the work. Got to love when that happens!
