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.

STS Endeavour

While at work today I received a distribution email from a friend at Johnson Space Center.

On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer ... on ENDEAVOUR! Even though it snowed last night, Santa hasn't changed his schedule ... but the Space Shuttle Endeavour will fly by Johnson Space Center today, circling over JSC between 11:45 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. while mounted on a modified Boeing 747 shuttle carrier aircraft.

I left my office and went in the back parking lot so I could see in the direction of JSC. I saw it over JSC (distantly) and thought it would come over the front of our building. So I walked to the front - was thinking too many trees.... and started walking another direction. I could HEAR it, but didn't know where it was. Then I turned around just in time to snap a photo of it between the trees.

I practically ran around the buliding to the back again and when it came off the last JSC flyby it went right over us, turned (so we saw the belly of the Boeing 737 SCA) and flew south.

It did a flyby somewhere east of us (maybe the Boeing building?) and then looked like it was heading NW to Ellington. (not sure of all the directions.)

Fifty Years Ago

July 29, 1958 On my Dad's 11th birthday Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act creating NASA. The new agency began operations on October 1 - which is when they will officially celebrate their Fiftieth Anniversary.

The Johnson Space Center History Office put together a short list of trivia questions for a program they presented earlier this year, and they've shared the list with me with permission to use the questions.

I'll post a few now and the rest on October 1. Have fun!

1) July 20, 1969. The crew of Apollo 11 lands on the moon. How many photographs are there of the first man to step out on the lunar surface?

2) Failure is Not an Option is now a well-known phrase associated with the "can-do" spirit of the space agency. Who is credited with the original wording?

3) Mercury 7 was the name given to the original class of astronauts selected in April 1959 that included seven pilots with college degrees. When did NASA announce the names of 35 astronauts that for the first time included women, minorities, and a new classification - mission specialists?

4) President John F. Kennedy spoke before a joint session of Congress when he announced the nation would send a man to the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade. Where was President George W. Bush when he announced the Vision to Space Exploration directing a return to the Moon and future misisons to Mars?

I'll post the answers in about a week, but only if I get any responses in the comments.

NASA

It's incredible to me that people think we should cancel the Space Program and not continue with our exploration, that it costs too much money. NASA receives less than 1% of the total federal budget and by far they have the highest return yield on any federal investment. Without even knowing or thinking about it, people use NASA "spinoffs" daily, from debit cards to cordless tools to portable defibrillators. How about satellites? Satellite radio, telephones, television, and weather radar.

What about the value of photos like this one of Hurricane Dean from the STS-118 Endeavor mission? This photo was not the purpose of the mission, but people respond better to visual resources. We would not have such detailed hurricane tracking information without weather satellites.