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Crew Collective is a podcast dedicated to the art of storytelling. Hosted by Stuart Barefoot, each episode will explore the stories that help shape us—books, movies, songs, video games—nothing is off limits. We’ll talk to creators of all stripes about their process, their craft, and the worlds they build.
Whether you’re a seasoned creator, just starting your journey, or simply a casual observer who likes behind the scenes looks at creative work, Crew Collective will provide an entertaining and informative listening experience. By mixing interview and documentary style storytelling, this show will provide in depth conversations and curated storytelling.
Season One: Space Stories
For season one, we'll explore six stories about outer space. Each episode will feature a creator from a different medium.
When you think about humans in outer space, I bet the first image that comes to mind is Neil Armstrong taking those famous first steps on the moon. I mean, that's always been the case for me, which makes sense. That moment was a big deal, No doubt about it. But it was just one moment from one mission. The Apollo program lasted eleven years, launched 17 missions, and produced tens of thousands of photographs.
Speaker 2:There was more than just one mission, that more than Neil Armstrong isn't the only man that's walked on the moon. So that is partly an an objective of the book is to go through every mission.
Speaker 1:Andy Saunders is a photographer who created a best selling book called Apollo Remastered. It's a collection of hundreds of remastered photographs taken by astronauts from the Apollo missions. The film for these photos had been sitting in a vault in Texas for nearly fifty years and technically, they were public domain and free to use, something that will come up later in another episode. But because of the sheer amount of time it would take to restore these photos, no one had really done it until Andy came along. Up to that point, a lot of the photos we'd seen from outer space had just been low quality duplicate film.
Speaker 2:And it just hit me that the to me, the most important photographs ever taken are actually getting progressively worse as time goes on whilst being seen by a progressively bigger audience. And that concept just I could not accept.
Speaker 1:So he developed a process to restore these photos and put them into a book. Apollo Remastered was a big hit. After it came out in 02/2022, Andy toured the world for a series of live exhibits and recently produced his follow-up book, Gemini and Mercury Remastered. But this isn't just a book, It's a photographic journey and a visual legacy that allows us to see the moon in outer space the same way astronauts saw it all those years ago. My name is Stuart, and this is Crew Collective, a podcast about storytelling.
Speaker 1:Each episode, we explore the stories that help shape us. Books, movies, songs, nothing is off limits. We'll talk to creators about their process, their craft, and the worlds they build. In season one, we're exploring space stories, so that's where Apollo Remastered fits in. And my conversation with the guy who created it is next.
Speaker 3:Crew Collective is brought to you by Rocketgenius, makers of Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms was the first premium WordPress contact form plug in launched in the space over fifteen years ago. Since then, brands like NASA, Delta, and Stanford University have relied on Gravity Forms for their WordPress form data. But so have tens of thousands of freelancers, agencies, and small creators, powering payment forms to newsletter sign ups. For small and large alike, Gravity Forms understands their mission.
Speaker 3:Build amazing software that people trust. Learn more at gravity.com. And we trust you enjoy Crew Collective as much as the team at Rocketgenius did making it.
Speaker 1:And now, my conversation with Andy Saunders, photographer and author of the book Apollo Remastered.
Speaker 2:I just always had an obsession since childhood, about the Apollo moon landings. I was just obsessed with anything that could fly, but then rockets were I always felt were kind of the ultimate flying machine. And then in terms of the moon, I remember looking at the moon through just a little toy telescope. Again, I was very young and being just fascinated with this place and how looking through a telescope, what's this what you usually see is a a two dimensional silver disc in the sky suddenly became three-dimensional. So it became a world that you could potentially go and visit in a rocket.
Speaker 2:And as a child, that was obviously very exciting. So I've always had that kind of childlike fascination with the Apollo moon landings. Always had this interest and and love for photography. And so working on these images was a was a way to kinda unite those two passions. But it really started with I was very conscious that something very important was missing because I wanted to see Neil Armstrong on the moon and I couldn't.
Speaker 2:And we've never been able to because he held the one and only camera they took onto the lunar surface. You remember this is an analog world. It seems insane that we could go to the moon and not take a photograph of the first man on the moon, but it was an analog world so they only took one camera and that always frustrated me. I wanted to see Neil Armstrong in the moon so that's when I decided to look at the other source of film that was taken which was this 16 millimeters noisy lower quality motion picture camera a bit like an old cine film camera which was pointed out to the lunar module and it filmed the EVA and then that's when it decided to apply this quite unusual stacking technique that's used in astrophotography on that film to produce that image that I always felt was missing from the history books and now we have it. The first clear recognisable image of Neil Armstrong and the moon.
Speaker 2:So that's what got me of known for doing it, that's where I built a lot of the skills and an interest, but also around that time was when the holy grail of film became available when NASA everything we've seen today has actually been based on duplicate film because the original film was too delicate, too valuable, so that was held in a frozen vault in Houston, Building eight Johnson Space Center. So everything we've seen in terms of the imagery from Apollo has been based on duplicates or copies of duplicates or an inter negative to create a photograph. You have this gradual degradation in the quality of the imagery and that's something else that always frustrated me. Actually took the best cameras, the best lenses. Film photography captures all of the detail that we can with digital photography.
Speaker 2:We should be seeing these images better. So when that film came out of the freezer and I was able to work on the raw scans and able to transform these images, that's then when I fully became what I do now, which is digitally restoring photographs particularly from this era.
Speaker 1:Getting the film is one thing. Making it presentable, that's another ordeal unto itself. Like Andy was saying, the film degrades over time, so he had to get innovative to restore these images to their former glory.
Speaker 2:These are super high resolution, high bit depth scans, so everything that was in that original film is captured in these scans. And what I do with that is isn't particularly innovative. I use kind of standard digital processing techniques to kind of stretch the contrast and and pull out the detail. The difficulty with it is once you've you've pushed the digital processing this hard is you get all kinds of artifacts on on the film. So you can tell something amazing in it, but it's not worthy of being shown.
Speaker 2:And so the trick there is just to to spend the time and the efforts to balance the whole frame to get the color correct to pull all that detail out and have something that's the best it can be. So that really is more taking the time and the effort to do it. The more innovative approach yes is this stacking technique. This is something that say is used in astrophotography. It's quite a difficult thing to explain but if you think of it in an analog world, so if you imagine you've taken some, let's call it cine film, some cine film footage at say 12 frames a second and if you imagine that film you can it's semi transparent and you can kind of see through it.
Speaker 2:If you then were to cut let's say 10 of those frames with a pair of scissors, if the image that's on it doesn't move too much and you can perfectly align that image and stack those 10 frames on top of each other squish them together and look through it you can probably imagine that the signal which is the image gets stronger but the noise doesn't get stronger because the noise is completely random. It's in a random place on every frame. So what you do by squishing these together and consolidating these frames is you strengthen the signal but you average out the noise so you basically improve the signal to noise ratio and the more frames you have the better the averaging so if anyone's really into the nerdy detail and the improvement in the signal to noise ratio is the equivalent to the square root of the number of frames so if we have nine frames where the where the action doesn't move too much, we get three times the improvement in in the signal to noise ratio. So it becomes that much clearer, more photo like, and we can pull out detail we've never been able to see before.
Speaker 2:Now the difficulty with that, so the stacking technique, like I it's used in astrophotography, it's used in I think in the medical profession and that kind of thing so it is a known technique. The difficulty is, so when I did the image of Neil Armstrong the camera was locked off and Armstrong was getting a contingency sample so his gold visor was up because he was in the shadow of the lunar module and because he's working on this sample he stays still for some time and that enabled me to lift pretty identical frames and stack them easily. When I started to do the book and I wanted to assess all of the 16 millimeter film from the whole of the Apollo program, I realized that actually most of it was filmed handheld by an amateur photographer who's floating around in zero g and he's trying to film someone else that's also floating around in zero g and so because of all that movement it's difficult to align and stack in the normal way so that's where then I developed a technique to continue to stack, but also still take account of all this movement. But in doing that, because they often panned the camera, so anyone that's seen the book, there's a there's a chapter on on every mission.
Speaker 2:Apollo thirteen was always a a particular interest of mine, and here was an opportunity because of it. It was all filmed on board this tiny spacecraft. I always wanted to step on board that spacecraft and take around and have a look around. Anyone that's seen the the movie, the Apollo 13 movie, if you're anything like me, I always get to the end and think what was it really like, what did it really look like and because Jim Lovell, even though they didn't know they'd get back alive and didn't know if they'd ever get that film processed and developed, he had the presence of mind to continue to shoot these sequences. Because he panned the camera, that has enabled me with this new technique to be able to not only stack but create a panoramic shot inside these spacecraft, for example, Aquarius.
Speaker 2:This lifeboat that got them home.
Speaker 1:I can see the picture right now, without opening the book, the picture of the three of them in that module, in that lifeboat as you call it. And they don't know they're gonna survive this mission or not. But the idea that they had the presence of mind for the sake of posterity, it's it's just an amazing it's an amazing story and it's it's just incredible that it's captured and been restored.
Speaker 4:Okay. That sounds good. We're considering powering down the pings, but we wanna know what capability you have to do a course and final line. And we read your conversation about being unable see out the window very good. How about out out the AOT?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That particular shot that that was with the 16 millimeter film and I think it was Fred Hayes on the camera at that moment and he just panned it towards them themselves and captured them because it's because he sweeps past all of them. I was able to get all three of them on. So he had to see the whole crew together as they were preparing to I think it was just before they were moved into the command module from memory to then separate and and hopefully get get home. And Fred Hayes mentioned when they went back into that command module, it's been turned off in effect almost completely for days in that environment, and they have to power it back up, power it back up all the systems.
Speaker 2:They didn't know if that was gonna work because the temperatures, he said that it was the the control panels were just full of condensation.
Speaker 4:Okay. And the other thing we thought you'd like to try is to put the service module between you and the sun and then to see if you can see anything out the window and that attitude.
Speaker 2:That mission is just it was just event after event after event that had to go right to get them home alive and that image of the three of them was I think close to the last that they filmed and then they entered that command module and at that point then they just hoped that the parachute system would work, the recovery system because at that point they didn't know for sure if the if the heat shield had been damaged. So, yeah, to get them home alive was, as Jean Crant say, perhaps NASA's finest hour.
Speaker 1:Of all NASA missions, Apollo eleven is pretty much the most famous, and for good reason. That was the moon landing. Well, the first one anyway. But Andy's book gives all the other missions their due credit as well. Case in point, Apollo eight in 1968 produced a photo known as Earthrise.
Speaker 1:You've probably seen it.
Speaker 2:It took a while for that image to become as prominent as we see it now. You know, perhaps one of the most famous photographs ever taken, certainly one of the most influential. Now we think of the environmental movement. This was a catalyst for the environmental movement that continues to today to today. So very important image, and it really was a bit of a team effort.
Speaker 2:What's incredible and again that some people may not realize is that wasn't taken on the first time that earth rose from the lunar surface. The first couple of orbits they didn't even notice it because again it depends on where the windows are orientated and they hadn't planned to witness earth rise and photograph it. Know this was a scientific mission they had a lot of other things to do and to focus on and testing the spacecraft and photographing the surface, looking for cues and first landing sites for the Apollo eleven mission. So it just wasn't at the forefront of their mind and it was only on the third orbit and it was a reason connected to photography actually that Bill Anders turned the spacecraft to face the windows towards the lunar surface and that's what suddenly brought the earth into view out of the window as it was rising above the lunar surface and Bill Anders spotted it and just hearing this in the in the audio or if you read it in the mission transcripts is great because he gets really excited he just like wow look at look at that, and then he obviously wants to get a photograph but he only has a black and white magazine on the back of the camera so again contrary to popular belief that Earthrise isn't actually the first photograph of Earthrise, he did take a black and white photograph first because that was what was on the back of the camera.
Speaker 2:That is in the book as well and it's an absolutely stunning photograph. It is in black and white but it's an absolutely stunning photograph and he was just desperate to get this on a color back and that's where he he asked the crew to, you know, get me quickly, get me a color magazine. I think it was Jim Lovell that eventually found the color magazine, got that to Anders, he got that on the back of the camera and then he got the the color photograph that he was that was after and that photograph that we all know so well. It's a very much a a team effort, know, Borman turned the spacecraft that allowed it to come into view, and they spotted it and happened to be holding the camera. Lovell found the color film, and between them, they they got that shot.
Speaker 4:Oh my god. Look at that picture over there. This is earth coming up. Wow. That's pretty.
Speaker 4:Hey. I'll take that off schedule. You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color. Oh, That's great.
Speaker 4:Quick.
Speaker 1:There's a whole backstory on how astronauts began taking cameras with them to outer space, which we'll get to later on in a different episode. And it really hits on something that blows my mind about this book. It's not like these astronauts were professional photographers or anything, and at least at first, NASA didn't send them up there to take photos. But as the Apollo program evolved, NASA figured out that these pictures they were taking were not only good, but had both scientific value and doubled as a good PR move. So they started introducing brief informal photography lessons into their training.
Speaker 2:I mean, the astronauts would became very keen. Some some were more keen than others to to do the training. Some by the time they got to the mission, they told me they were just absolutely fed up of taking photographs because they were driven to do it because this is such a it's a finite resource. As I say, the the scientific return per photograph, everyone is is so valuable. And, of course, we think today in the digital world, when we go back to the moon on Artemis, we can take an infinite number of photographs.
Speaker 2:Here they had to be very selective and so they had to be trained very well to use the cameras. They also didn't have, for example, a viewfinder. There was no automated features on the camera. The only automated automation was when they got onto the moon, they used a Hasselblad 500 e l, had an electric motor, which meant that when they took a photograph, it would wind the film for them. I mean, was about as, you know, automated as they got.
Speaker 2:So they had to set they exposed themselves, the focus themselves and because of the tight confines of the spacecraft and because of the helmet and the suit, the type of viewfinder that you had on these older cameras that popped up on the top of the camera that you would have to look down, you typically hold them at your waist and look down to see through the lens, we can't do that in a spacesuit and so they got rid of that so a lot of that training was to be able to capture what they wanted to capture but without having a viewfinder. Also to get the exposures correct, to get the focus correct. So that's why they had to train particularly hard and yes they take them on vacation, they take them in the t 38 training jets, they would they would take them on these geological field trips and they would take photographs, have them critiqued, go again, take photographs until they got so expert that when they're in that environment, in that vital moment when they're on the moon, the chances of them taking a photograph that's of scientific value is that much higher and they were brilliant at it.
Speaker 2:So I went through they took 35 well, 35,000 photographs were taken throughout the whole program. Not all of those were handheld on the lunar surface, but thousands and thousands and thousands of handheld photographs and the vast like 99 something percent were right on the money. They were correctly focused, exposure was pretty good and they captured what they intended to capture. They didn't need to do much rotating, cropping and that kind of thing so they clearly did that training, clearly worked very well. The other thing that makes it a little bit easier if you think about it, taking photographs in space is that they don't have a variable of weather.
Speaker 2:There are no clouds in space, it's always either a known brightness when you're not in the shade or a known light level when you are in the shade so that was a benefit so again as you got throughout the mission they could learn from the previous mission. So by the time we got to Apollo 17, I mean the photographs that needs a book all on its own. I mean the photographs there are absolutely stunning. Interestingly that is probably that you mentioned earlier about you know, they wouldn't do post photographs. That is the only mission other than a little bit on Apollo twelve.
Speaker 2:On Apollo seventeen, they really made an effort to try and capture themselves and for example the earth above them. So there was a little element, not for many photographs but for a few and I think that was partly they took so many magazines of film, it was a last mission for what we didn't know then over fifty years, So I think that's why they did start to take a few staged photographs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And somebody had the presence of mind on the way back to get one more picture of the moon as they were headed back towards Earth. Think it's one of the last photos you have in the book with the caption, you know, goodbye moon, not knowing again it would be more than fifty years before anybody returned.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That was that was on the deep space EVA. So, again, because of the photography, they had to they had to actually exit the spacecraft and go and collect these film magazines, these huge film cans that were stored in the service module. So as well as the handheld photographs, they also had this camera with huge resolution, a 127 millimeter film that was in in the service module.
Speaker 2:So that was controlled by the command module pilot who can open the hatch, start the the sequence of photographs, but then they would have to exit the spacecraft, which is very risky to go and simply collect that film. Whilst he was out, they took these these photographs of this incredible point where they looked one way and there is the distant moon and then they look the opposite direction and there's the distant earth which must have been pretty spectacular.
Speaker 1:Speaking of Apollo 17, it produced an image that's equal parts beautiful and eerie, for lack of a better word. It's this lunar module, sitting on the moon's surface off in the distance. Astronauts Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harry Schmidt were out exploring the moon and a rover and looked back to see their only connection to civilization, nearly 239,000 miles from Earth. And from their vantage point, it looked tiny.
Speaker 2:That was actually a photograph that I first saw in a book in the nineties called Full Moon, and I was obsessed with it. I mean, I just like that. It just hits you the not just the scale and the grandeur of of the moon, but when you see how how far away they were from the relative safety, this little home they had, this tiny spacecraft that delivered them to the surface. It just really, really resonated. So when I was now able to get at the original flight film, I really wanted to do the best I possibly could with this image.
Speaker 2:What I've actually done is created a panorama because there were we took more than one photograph, so I wanted more of that landscape. So this is actually two photographs stitched together to get more even more of that grandeur and scale. I think it's the south south massive is beyond the lunar module and the east massive I think is is beyond that. So these are these mountains in the Taurus Littoral Valley where they landed and there's this tiny spacecraft sitting on the lunar surface just under two miles away and it is an absolutely stunning photograph and that was taken with a 500 millimeter lens so a very large telephoto lens which itself had quite an interesting story because it was on Apollo fifteen which was the first J mission, so this is one of the the first big scientific missions. They landed in the Hadley Penine region which is photogenic is an absolutely stunning region to land and of great scientific interest.
Speaker 2:But a lot of what they wanted to look at, for example the mountains, were of course a long way away and even though this was the first J mission and so they had the first rover and could get a lot further than they could on previous missions, they wanted to get even closer and the easiest way to do that is to have a longer lens on the camera. So Leo Silver, who was the geologist, but particularly the crew and in particular Dave Scott who was the commander, really pushed hard to take this 500 millimeter huge lens on that mission but NASA said no, it's just too big and it's too heavy so you know we think trying to squeeze every last little piece of film because of the weight in these magazines and the number of cameras and magazines they were already taking. And this lens is a foot long, weighs two kilograms and in the end he said okay well take some abort fuel off me and in the end that was a compromise they made they said so they took the equivalent of the mass of the lens away from his abort fuel and it took the lens and it made it on that mission and took some fantastic photographs from a scientific point of view that could get a lot of information from those.
Speaker 2:And so it also went on Apollo 16 and Apollo 17, and it's with that lens that took this particularly stunning photograph.
Speaker 1:I mean, we see this from the perspective of the photographer of the lens. I'm trying to imagine being out. What is that out there? Is that like a little rover? A little what what is that out there that we're seeing in the distance exactly?
Speaker 2:That's the lunar module. So that
Speaker 1:The lunar module. So who who was in the lunar module? Do we know?
Speaker 2:Nobody. No. Nobody was in lunar in the lunar rover, and they went off to these different geological stations, and they drove. Actually on Apollo 17, they got to 4.7 miles away from there. So they slept in the lunar module.
Speaker 2:That's the other thing I love about seeing these photographs. That's their home. They slept in there for three nights. So that
Speaker 1:little speck, that little the only remnant of civilization at all is is that tiny little thing against that that has gotta be surreal to look at that. I mean, it's gotta be I mean, obviously, there's a lot of that this is the seventeenth mission, of course. There is still a whole team, but there is there's gotta be something pretty humbling about that's home right now. That's
Speaker 2:That's their and only relative safety, you know, compared to the bay suits. So, yeah, they'd sleep there for three nights. They'd get up in the morning and their day at work was they would get their gear on and step out onto the moon into the lunar over and and drive around and do this geological sampling and go up slopes and to the edges of there's another stunning shot in the book which is a three page gatefold so the book has these pages which fold out so they're like a meter wide and it's a panoramic sweep of a crater on Apollo 17 and we can see the lunar module and we can see Jack Schmidt who took this photograph and just to see that the grandeur and scale of the lunar landscape. So they go around and see these incredible things and that was the yeah that was their day at work and then they return to that lunar module and they'd set up the hammocks and they'd sleep. Another great photograph again on Apollo 17 that's in the book it's one of the last it's one of the last photographs taken on the lunar surface back in 1972.
Speaker 2:It's of the commander, Gene Cernan, and he's you can see the suits piled up on the Ascent engine cover, and he's just in his kind of undergarment, and you can see his kind of biomed sensors. He's filthy. He's got moon dust all over his face, he looks exhausted and that's a fantastic documentary type shot of the last man on the moon in this little tin can he even described it. So that's what went on inside that lunar module that was their home for three days. This was taken from as I say about two miles away and yes they had to have confidence in the rover to get that far so and this the confidence yes developed from mission to mission on Apollo 11.
Speaker 2:The furthest they got from the lunar module was about 200 feet because they didn't have a rover and of course it was the first mission and they had to build up the confidence in what they were doing. They got further and further and then with the rover they could then push that envelope even further like say to 4.7 miles which was what was considered the safe walk back limit so if that rover failed they reckoned that they could between them walk home 4.7 miles, which sounds quite an extraordinary thing to do and a bit of a risky thing to do, but that was considered the the edge of the envelope.
Speaker 1:Right. They wouldn't go out further than they knew they could walk back. Right. I mean, because anything could happen out there. You could lose a tire.
Speaker 1:The thing I think it break down. I mean, they're they're really traversing into the into the great unknown.
Speaker 2:And things did happen with the rover. I mean, they they broke the fender off the back which doesn't sound particularly serious, but on the moon, with all that moon dust being then not captured by the fender landed on the batteries. And because it's a dark color and they're in a vacuum, that then heats with the sun very quickly and could have overheated the batteries and that's it. Rover out of action. So that so there were kind of some issues with the rover.
Speaker 2:Things that that we would consider quite minor on Earth are not when you're on the moon.
Speaker 1:Apollo remastered is chock full of stunning imagery, but not every photo in the book is mind blowing, at least not at first glance. During Apollo eleven, before Armstrong took his famous one small step, he snapped a picture off to the side of their spacecraft. And it looks kind of uninspiring until you realize it's the first photograph ever taken on another world.
Speaker 2:The the background to some of the photographs, the photographs that come before or after perhaps perhaps a particularly famous image are all vital parts of the storytelling of the mission of and of what they were achieving. So some of the photographs in the book aren't very aesthetically pleasing but they're of historical significance. Some of them are there because there are something happened that is fundamental to like say to tell the story. We have images like the Blue Marble which is the most reproduced photograph in history. I mean, we've seen it everywhere that was taken on Apollo 17 of of of Earth amongst the blackness of space.
Speaker 2:But you know what what were the astronauts saying at the time? What was what photographs were taken just before it? What what does it mean when we think about the fact that you may see that photograph or just going back to the blue marble for a moment and we've seen it in textbooks, we see it on cereal packets, t shirts and you may think, oh look look, there's the whole earth, that's a nice photograph and just get on with your day but I think when you really look at it, look like I say, what were the astronauts, what was going on, you know, why was that photograph taken? There were three men inside a tiny capsule traveling at 20,000 miles an hour away from their home planet on a trajectory that wouldn't ordinarily get them home and one of them lifted the camera to the window, released the shutter and took that photograph of the whole earth amongst the endless blacks of space, I think having a human behind the lens and thinking about that context is what makes those photographs even more special. So this one on Apollo eleven, yeah, isn't a particularly stunning photograph, in fact it isn't a stunning photograph, but it's the first photograph one of us has taken on another world so it's of that significance.
Speaker 2:Actually shouldn't really have taken that photograph at that point, that wasn't in the mission plan. The mission plan called for so he'd come down the ladder, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind of course and then he stepped off, didn't want to move too far from the lunar module, no one's walked on the moon before, is he gonna sink, is he gonna fall, is he you know and on his checklist it does say get the camera down from the lunar module and they had to do that, they didn't have it on the chest when they came down the ladder they had something called the lunar equipment conveyor or the LEC basically some of some rope really on a conveyor that they could then buzz all in and attach the camera to it and Neil Armstrong could pull the camera down, attach it to his chest and start taking photographs. But the mission plan called the first thing he should have done is take a contingency sample. So this was in case something of an emergency that happened. He would get one small sample in his pocket so that at least the geologist would have a sample of the moon albeit a very small sample.
Speaker 2:But he got the camera down on the OEC and he put it on his chest and when it was on his chest I think he just thought well it's on my chest let's take some photographs right now and that was the very first and actually this was the first of a sequence so he did a panoramic sequence. The astronauts, particularly on the latter missions actually, were trained to take a photograph, turn 20 degrees, take a photograph, turn 20 degrees, take a photograph to create these panoramic sequences. And this is what Armstrong this is the first thing he did on the moon was to to take this sequence of photographs of which this is the very first.
Speaker 1:What's the reaction to that? Does he get, like, a dressing down from mission control or anything? Or did they just kinda let it slide?
Speaker 2:No. Mean, the mission was going so well. And I think when you got the first two people on the moon
Speaker 1:You'd have to be a real stick in the mud.
Speaker 2:It's quite difficult to then be a bit of a stick in mud about the precise order of things. But you can hear and read in the transcripts is is mission control internally are saying, has has he got the contingency sample? No, don't think so. And then they decide not to mention it for that reason. They also don't want to kind of flust the astronauts.
Speaker 2:Know their job, things were going well, but yeah, they they were really keen to get this contingency sample. And in the end, they did say, you know, Neil, have you got the contingency sample? And he said, and that was the next thing you did. I'm working on it now. And actually, as he was collecting that contingency sample as I mentioned at the start that's when thankfully he lifted his visor and he stood still long enough that I was able to use the 16 millimeter film that was pointing out to the window of the lunar module to get that image of of him, that clear image finally after fifty years of the first man on the moon.
Speaker 1:One of the other reasons why I chose this picture in particular to discuss with you is that I think in the caption somewhere, aside from making that executive decision about the order in which he he was gonna do things, he also forfeited a rest period, I think. Right? Like, wasn't he wasn't it worked into his schedule, I guess, that he could get, for for lack of a better word, a nap. But there's this, like, very human thing. I just landed on the moon.
Speaker 1:I'm not taking a nap. Like and I guess, like, it shows this very human side. Like, we think Neil Armstrong, superhuman astronaut. But, I mean, I think he had to be pretty giddy. I mean, he's up there on the moon.
Speaker 1:He had to understand the significance of what he was doing, but also just this very childlike wonder of like, I'm not taking a nap, are you kidding me?
Speaker 2:It was just really bad planning, wasn't it? To land on the moon and then factor in a period. It was kind of an optional four hour rest period. Again, you know, they've got to make sure the astronauts are in, are focused and ready to complete the mission and so given what they've been through with the landing, think it was considered that let's have that four hour rest period as an option and they had an incredibly long stressful time landing on the moon, but as you say, they then landed and they said, we're gonna take this four hour rest period. You know, they are feet away from the lunar surface, the first people to walk on the moon, they could see the lunar surface out the window, there's the hatch right next to them.
Speaker 2:Let's depressurize, get our suits on and get out. So the decision was, yeah, how could you possibly have a nap? Land on the moon and become the first to walk on the moon and just have it. Yeah. I'd like to think he made the right decision.
Speaker 1:Big picture stuff like, why does it matter to the average person to someone who's maybe never thought about reading a book like Apollo remastered before? Why is it important that we all get to see outer space?
Speaker 2:I might be biased, but think a lot of people would agree that, you know, walking on the moon is probably our greatest ever achievement. The photographs that were taken at this pivotal moment when we humans were able to leave our home planet for the first time and walk on another world, and the photographs are really will forever symbolize and document the beginning of humanity's expansion out into the universe. You know, we'll eventually yes. We walked on the moon. We'll eventually walk on Mars.
Speaker 2:We will eventually become a multiplanetary species, but this is where it all began. It was Richard Underwood who's NASA's chief of photography who made the point to the astronauts before they went that, look, when you get back, you'll be a national hero. And maybe in decades, there may be some really nerdy teenager that wants to go through all the data and all of the documentation, but really, it's the photographs are are kind of the starting point forever of referring back to going to the moon. If you get great photographs, they'll live forever. And I think he was right, you know, Earthrise, the Blue Marble, Buzz Aldrin, Man on the Moon.
Speaker 2:It's the photographs that I think we we naturally turn to and they will forever I think document and symbolize what is a pivotal moment in human evolution. Like I say, photographs for fifty years were based on this duplicate film and they were just the way they presented just drove me nuts because they were they were also getting progressively worse. So you had all this copying of of duplicate film back in the analog days and then in the in the digital world, it got worse because it's so easy to put a JPEG on the internet. Someone will copy it and save it again and put it back on and crop it and rotate. And it just hit me that the to me, the most important photographs I've ever taken are actually getting progressively worse as time goes on whilst being seen by a progressively bigger audience.
Speaker 2:And that concept just I could not accept that and so to finally have the holy grail of film, this original film out of the freezer. So this is the film that was actually in the cameras on the moon. So we can think of negative film, it wasn't actually negative film. It was the color photographs, the image resided on that very film that was in the camera in a color correct positive form. So to have that film that was literally exposed in this alien environment finally out of this freezer and scanned to an incredibly high resolution to go back to the source for the first time and be able to see these photographs in a way you've never been able to see before, that is what compelled me to you know, when I when I see a bad image, it's tantamount to someone writing about Apollo 11 and misquoting Armstrong's one small step speech.
Speaker 2:I mean, it just it just shouldn't happen. They are too important not to be seen correctly under the best, which is why then I decided to once this film came out the freezer, I put my life on hold and ten thousand hours of digital processing later and a lot of research, we we we find the altar to see the Apollo missions in this way.
Speaker 1:If there's one photo in Apollo Remastered, one we haven't discussed yet, Is there one that you'd recommend?
Speaker 2:Gosh, that's an almost impossible question. Like I said, it's 35,000 narrowing it down to 400 for the book, which is unused. I mean, it's a huge number for a book for under photographs. It was almost impossible. So to then narrow that down to one, and I like different photographs for different reasons.
Speaker 2:There are these historically important ones such as the the only clear image of Neil Armstrong and the moon. But probably if I if I was really, really pressed, I mean, the front cover, and it's probably obvious to say, you know, it made the front cover, was it had a bit of everything, so this was a photograph that was unbelievably underexposed. So when I was going through these 35,000 photographs, I'm looking for anything that gives me a clue that there might be something interesting in it that's worth the 1.3 gigabyte file download and and spending time to to look into it. But there was a little glimpse of a window. So I thought, well, might be something if I can see a window, there might be a person in it.
Speaker 2:And I could see a little purple square in the corner of the window which I knew was the guidance site so I thought we'll have a look at that and then when I started to stretch the contrast and look at what was in this I thought oh wow there's a person in this and this could be a fantastic photograph. But again, it is so underexposed when you push the processing this hard. We had all these artifacts on it. It just was not presentable, but it was clearly gonna be a stunning image. So that that front cover took me about two days working on it to get it right and we end up basically it's a portrait of the commander Jim McDivitt on Apollo nine it looks like he's looking up in wonder through the window but in fact the reality is even better so in researching all his photographs I spoke to Rusty Swycart who actually took that photograph and he said I can't tell you how hard Jim is focusing in this moment because as it turns out he is actually undertaking the docking, not any old docking, the first ever docking between two crewed spacecraft.
Speaker 2:So an incredibly high pressure moment. This was the first time we had people in a spacecraft that was incapable getting them home because they were in the lunar module that has no heat shield and they were in Earth orbit. So Apollo nine didn't go to the moon, they were just testing the lunar module and the command module. So that the heat shield was on the command module that he was trying to dock to. So if he didn't make the docking and it's never been done before, they are not getting home.
Speaker 2:He also had to translate all the movement through 90 degrees in his head because the controls are set up to land on the moon to look forwards out of the lunar module window, but he was looking up performing the docking. He then Rusty Swycart said that he tried to get the inverter camera software adapted to do this for him before the flight, but NASA said, we've not got essentially, we've not got time for that. Don't worry. Jim will be fine. And so Jim had to translate all his movement through 90 degrees in his head.
Speaker 2:He had to dock if not, they weren't getting home and it's never been done before and this is the moment it's happening. So this photograph for me had a bit of everything. It's one we've almost never seen because it was in such a bad state. The lighting is stunning and we have this portrait of the commander undertaking this first docking. So that photograph for me is probably one that's got a little bit of of everything in it.
Speaker 1:A passage from Apollo Remastered recommends reading the book, alone, at night when everything gets real quiet. A special thanks to Andy Saunders for joining us on this episode of Crew Collective. To learn more about his work, check out apolloremastered.com. And while you're there, check out his new book Gemini and Mercury Remastered. Same concept, different missions.
Speaker 1:Also, all of that and more is linked below. Crew Collective is brought to you by Rocket Genius. Our executive producers are Matt Maderos and Travis Tots. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me. I'm Stuart Barefoot.
Speaker 1:More episodes are available at crewcollectivepodcast.com or anywhere else you might get podcasts. Next time on Crew Collective.
Speaker 5:And I'd read a couple of space books, and my main question at the time had been like, how does it feel to leave everything behind? Like, do they miss Earth? Do they miss their family? It's a real commitment to go on a long journey. So, yeah, my idea for Terra Two kinda came from a mixture of those inspirations.