This is Earthrise. It's the photo of
Earth that changed the world. But it really shouldn't exist.
“This event goes beyond the limits of a national achievement and marks
a stage in the development of earthmen.” It was an improvisation, taken from a
rolling spacecraft, one that was plagued by fogged windows, and one where one of
history's greatest photographs was followed by blurry misframed ones like this and this,
because the astronauts couldn't actually see what they were photographing.
Earthrise wasn't even shot like this, it was like this.
This photo became postage. It was a symbol of humanity. But I want to focus
on the photography part. Just that. Because that story is worth telling.
It is a gateway to the blurry history of NASA photography as a whole. From general
disinterest in non-scientific photography, to a hacked camera, to custom space camera tests,
to blurry shots of windows and gorgeous shots of windows that you've probably never seen.
The more you learn about this photograph, the more impossible it seems.
“Hand me a roll of color quick, will you?” “Oh, man, this is crazy. Hurry. Quick.”
I have a project I'm going to be doing during the course of this video.
But this story starts way before that. “White Sands, New Mexico. A 5, 000 square
mile tract of barren, sun baked wasteland, 60 miles to the north of El Paso, Texas.”
Scientists sought to make a laboratory of the rocket's warhead.
And that eventually included a camera. This image, taken from a U. S. launched
V2 rocket in 1946, is generally accepted to be the first photograph of Earth from space.
For potential applications of space photography, assessments praised the ability to find a
synoptic picture of a large area. You hear that word, synoptic,
just imagine a big, system wide overview. Scientists realized that photography like
this could be achieved in space, but also more scientific synoptic photography, like this,
giving scientists an understanding of geographic systems, one that they didn't have before. Stuff
like cloud formations. Photos like this one from an early unmanned flight. See how these
cloud formations would have been kind of foreign to scientists before that? They were all about
cameras to take general information photos like this. I want to pause for a second here.
I don't know if this is the bias of a guy who makes videos, but I think it's really
interesting that the public relations aspect of these photographs wasn't really considered at
the beginning. It only emerged later on. And when it did, it was kind of a fluke.
“Glenn takes his place.” John Glenn tells the story in his memoir.
He had to convince NASA to let him take a camera. One of the Life photographers, Ralph Morse, was
assigned to NASA, and he suggested trying to adapt a Leica and a couple of other kinds of cameras.
“One day, I was down in Cocoa Beach, getting a haircut, one of my rare trips off the Cape. I
went into the drugstore next door. I bought it on the spot for $45. When I took it back to the Cape,
it turned out to be more readily adaptable than any of the others.”
Versions of this camera were sold as a good camera for bad photographers because of the
automatic settings. Point and shoot photographs, that was kind of a new idea, but it worked.
A Leica was used for spectrographic imagery. And so this was the progression of NASA photography:
modified commercial units, seemingly inspired by whatever the astronauts picked up.
This Robot Recorder was used in the next mission, but it was in the Mercury Atlas 8 where Wally
Schirra established the camera and lens that would be associated with NASA most significantly.
Inspired by the consumer facing Hasselblad (I (Phil) pronounces this really pretentiously
throughout, I have no idea why but I can’t change it now), Schirra had
NASA engineers modify a Hasselblad 500C. If you don't know the name Hasselblad,
they're like a premium Swedish camera company. And yet, this unlikely partnership ended up
shaping a lot of NASA photography. As a hobbyist photographer, Schirra was attracted to it.
And some evidence suggests that NASA photographer Bill Taub, with the life guy,
Ralph Morse, steered him toward it. Taub took photos like these wind tunnel
ones as well. Can we just go back to how cool he looks here, by the way? Gotta dwell on this a bit.
NASA had to customize the camera and lens. Most importantly, they stripped away the screen, the
hood, the mirror, and the linings to save weight. So let me just emphasize something here. They
stripped the mirror away. The astronauts couldn't see what they were shooting. Part of the thinking
was that it would add weight, also they couldn't like, put a viewfinder up to their eyes if they
were inside a space helmet. But regardless, all they had to guide their shots was a sighting ring.
And then they kinda had to guess. Schirra's early Mercury photos, they were overexposed,
perhaps partly for this reason. Those were NASA's words, not mine. No judgment. But by
the next mission, beautiful images of Earth began to appear from the modified Hasselblad. The Gemini
program led to optimization. This color control patch, a common photography tool, helped NASA to
make sure the colors were registering correctly. NASA aimed its focus on synoptic surveys, like
this photograph of China. But some of the handheld photos, taken with a different camera, a Zeiss
Contarex, showed the potential of human focused shots. Pictures of stunning spacewalks on the
same mission helped NASA to see the potential of photography and expand their experiments.
They were getting more serious and Gemini 10 had maybe one of the most
extreme photography experiments ever. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Most roles in NASA photography after Gemini began with that color card photograph. But
there was a crazy problem. Some astronauts said that the colors they saw in space differed from
what ended up on the photos. So, NASA was wondering, does space screw up the camera?
Does it screw up the film? Is there some sort of radiation thing happening?
This is where Experiment M410 comes in. NASA built a rig to hold their color patch
out in space and take a picture of it. Note that they were testing a slightly different camera,
and so an astronaut kind of poked out in space to check the colors.
They photographed the color patch on Earth. And they did it in space. The experiment
concluded early. But the photos worked. But even with extreme testing like this,
it was highly improbable that they would get the most important photograph of all.
And so this ends up being about a quarter of the photos taken on that Apollo 8 mission.
But as you can see, they're pretty much all the moon. The Apollo 8 mission was
the first to travel around the moon, and there were three major factors
arrayed against Earthrise happening. Photographic, technical, and cultural.
For the Apollo 8 mission, NASA switched to the Hasselblad EL— similar to the 500C, but with more
automatic functions like exposure and winding. By this point, Hasselblad was working with NASA
to design with lighter metals and otherwise optimize the camera. Custom film, lubricants,
and lenses were also standard, though it's key that these customizations were relatively small.
They also had been trained to get better at kind of aiming their camera without a
viewfinder. Because they were still shooting blind. I think there's no more visible sign
of this than in the orientation of Earthrise. The picture was taken like this. Only later
was it framed to be rising over the moon. The technical obstacles were important too.
As the mission report shows, window fogging occurred due to outgassing—gas leaking out,
making windows unusable. Fogged surfaces limited where astronauts could shoot from. If you look
right here, you can see that, you know, it's fog that was causing this shot to look that way.
You can even see a little circle of fog right here in this black and white photo that was
taken immediately before the more famous color version. I think the hardest part here though,
it was cultural. I mean, they weren't here to take cool photos of Earth. So I think this is
the context that you need, though. All these shots are of the moon.
“The significance of the flight is that it is an immensely important stepping stone to the
whole Apollo program, which we hope will now end up by getting the American on the moon in 1969.”
You can find a home movies reel and a very famous broadcast from space.
But a lot of the filmed records are moon videos. If you look at this photography report after the
mission, you find one of the prime tasks should be photography of the lunar surface. There's a
line here all the way back to John Glenn having to convince NASA to let him take a camera. So
how did Earthrise happen? On the fourth lunar revolution, Bill Anders noticed Earth rising.
Not through a mission plan, but through intuition,
that something amazing was happening. “Oh look at that. Wow, that's pretty.”
Frank Borman said, “Hey, don't take that. That's not on the schedule.”
It was kind of a joke, kind of not. Borman had been told the schedule was
tight earlier in the flight. “Is that a color film, Jim?”
And this was the key moment. Anders asked for that color film. He used his intuition
to know that this photo needed color. “Hand me a roll of color, quick.”
But the shot rolled away. “Hey I got it right here.”
But Lovell is looking out of that foggy hatch window, so they move to another view.
“Take several of them! Here, give it to me.” “Wait a minute, let's get the right setting,
here now; just calm down. Calm down, Lovell.” “Well, I got it ri - Oh, that's a beautiful shot.”
They stole this moment. From the camera, from the fog, from the schedule. And they clicked. Clicked.
And then, it disappeared. In the Apollo 8 press kit's listing of photographic tasks,
items of interest include zodiacal light, the lunar surface in earthshine,
and other items selected by the crew. That is why I made this video. Why I
think the photographic story of Earthrise is worth telling. It is clear from the history,
from the transcripts, and even from the reports after the mission,
that taking a photograph like this wasn't part of the plan.
I don't doubt that the effect on Earth was profound, as well as
the effect on the Hasselblad brand. I have an illustration of what made Earthrise unlikely,
but I think what made it happen reveals the magic of photography. There were
technical advances, pistol grips and modified cases and space film tests.
There was preparation, the trainings astronauts began to take, the stocking of cameras and film.
But there was also the human interest. Making buddies with Life photographers, the whimsy
to pick up a camera in a drugstore, the eye to see a good shot and the perspective to turn a
photograph so that earth was rising over the moon. The perspective to say that all these photos of
the moon were valuable and necessary and good, but there might be other photographs worth taking too.
Alright, that is it for this video. Thank you for watching. Uh, I just wanted to do a dive into the
culture of photography at NASA that led to Earthrise happening. It was really pretty
unlikely. Um, there are hundreds upon hundreds of pages that you can read to research this stuff.
I put a lot of sources below. Um, probably the most influential was a dissertation by Jennifer
Levasseur. She's at the Smithsonian. I actually interviewed her a million years ago for a story
about astronaut ice cream. But NASA photography was the subject of her dissertation and it really
helped me feel okay about my take that this NASA photography was sort of an experimental and
more improvisatory thing than you might imagine. Of course, those are my words, not hers. So yeah,
I encourage you to read all that stuff. If you want to check out more, there'll be a reaction
video to this one up on Patreon. That's where I give you kind of extra commentary
and notes. And yeah, I just want to thank you for watching and going with me on this journey.
Loved digging into these photos that I had never seen before and,
uh, I encourage you to do the same because there are gems out there that are really worth looking
at. So I've provided links to where to do that below. Thank you for watching. Alright.