NASA Images...

Here's yet another fantastic resource appearing on the web: an archive of NASA's imagery. The collection stretches all the way back to NASA's earliest days.

Wandering through this collection this morning triggered all sorts of happy memories for me. I was a young lad during NASA's first years, and I followed the space program with intense interest. Relatively little of it was available on television (the public just wasn't all that interested, and the technology was a bit primitive). Mostly I read news reports, read books, and perused the images in National Geographic. Those were heady days for me, and the few live events that I got to see are vivid memories. The best of them all: watching television in my uncle's basement in the middle of the night when Armstrong and Aldrin landed and walked on the moon (Apollo 11, TV frame at right).

The Ranger project (small satellites aimed at the moon, taking photos until they crashed into the surface) and the Surveyor project (robotic lunar landers that provided the first detailed information about the surface of the moon) were particular interests of mine in the early '60s. I was fascinated by the challenge the engineers faced, using the very best of the day's technology to explore our nearest neighbor in the solar system. It's probably hard for young people today to imagine just how daunting the engineering challenge was. The early robotic missions had very high failure rates. I remember well on the earlier Ranger missions that the little satellites either missed the moon completely, missed their target on the moon, or had failures that prevented them from operating correctly. Only on the last few Ranger missions did the engineer succeed: they hit the moon, they hit their intended target, and the instruments and cameras operated all the way until impact. Today we do amazing things like manuever the Cassini satellite with pinpoint accuracy in its travels around Saturn and visits to its satellites, and put down a Martian lander right where we wanted it – utterly unthinkable feats in the '60s.

If you have any interest at all in space exploration, you'll be amply rewarded by a visit to this site...