50 Years of NASA Imagery

UHCL held their opening reception for the JSC exhibit "Fifty Years of NASA Imagery" this afternoon. The program consisted of UHCL President Dr. William Staples, JSC Center Director Michael Coats and yours truly.

Originally scheduled to be a small affair with thirty or so images and maybe 40-50 guests, it exploded when over 220 people sent in RSVPs. The University Advancement office pulled it all off brilliantly, expanding the exhibit (for the reception only), ordering more food, and moving the main location to a larger space.


This morning I pulled together about fifteen photos, with captions, from our JSC History Collection to put in a locked display case to be a part of the exhibit also. I'm so glad that I did, because I saw many people, especially what you might call the old-timers, pointing and chatting about the images.


Dr. Staples spoke and Mike Coats announced the new UHCL/JSC Space Act Agreement, but what stands out is that Dr. Staples praised my work in the Archives. It's very gratifying to hear those words come from our University president. I had three minutes to speak about the Archives, our MOU, our growth, and photographs. Many people told me I spoke very well - slowly (at last!) and with enunciation. Whew.




EDITED to add the text of my talk:

Today’s exhibit honors 50 years of NASA Imagery. NASA photographs have united the world in a unique way ever since the Apollo 8 Earthrise, that extraordinary moment in 1968 when the whole Earth first saw the whole Earth. While photography documents or records subjects in a visual format, it also evokes emotion and interpretation based on the viewer’s own personal experiences.

In 2001 UHCL became the home of the Johnson Space Center History Collection through an MOU signed with NASA and the National Archives. Housed on the 2nd level of the Neumann Library, the collection consists of more than a million and a half memos, reports, oral histories, publications, and photographs documenting manned spaceflight.

While the material upstairs is not the formal, official, record copy, the collection nonetheless is extremely valuable because of the item-level and folder level indexing on two databases maintained by Johnson Space Center. With these databases, we are able to assist both scholars, and NASA employees and contractors with their requests for information. Whether it’s writing a PhD dissertation on space suit development, reviewing lunar landing sites not utilized during Apollo, or compiling information about command service module umbilicals or EVA handholds, in the past seven years our records have been accessed by over 800 people in person and another 1700 requests via email.

This collection continues to grow through the generous donations of retired JSC employees. Records are being added annually by men such as Aleck Bond – who worked to develop heat shields, Sam Nassiff who managed the LLRV/LLTV project, and Michael Reynolds, who worked in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. We’re working with NASA Johnson Space Center to continue collecting from retirees across the area.

Though the most popular NASA images may be found on their new nasaimages.org website, the JSC History Collection contains a surprising number of lesser known images. The photographs housed at UHCL were collected because of their use within a specific JSC department, such as the Technical Services Division, whose 12 boxes of black and white and color photographs from 1959-1972 include images - from seemingly ordinary equipment, tools, and parts housed in the machine shop, to an individual carefully crafting an early Shuttle model.

The Flight Crew Operations boxes contain folder after folder of training and simulation activities, including rendezvous and docking, desert survival and Skylab era Neutral Buoyancy training.

Though what I’ve briefly described may not seem as exciting as those images in this exhibit today, they are also capable of bringing great pleasure when they are rediscovered and utilized by our researchers in the Archives. I invite you all to come and visit the Archives.