Space City: Photographs from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish engineer and amateur astronomer James Nasmyth made plaster models of the moon and photographed them in raking light to faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow he had observed through his telescope.  To promote his conviction that the moon's surface was formed by volcanoes, he emulated steam by using his fingerprints on the reproduction plate before printing it.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, best known as the Wright brothers, achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight. By 1905 they had built the world’s first practical engine-powered airplane. By 1910, there were airplane producers in France, England, Germany, and Russia, as well as the Wright brothers’ company and others in the United States. Although commercial air transportation did not gain acceptance for another decade, the idea of human flight had captured the public’s imagination. 

There are three primary sites of NASA explorations: the launch facilities at John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center in Houston; and Edwards Air Force Base in California. The choice of Houston as the home of NASA’s mission control center can be attributed to the combined political clout of then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Representative Albert Thomas, a key member of the House of Appropriations Subcommittee. Although Houston had the required advantages of highway, rail, water and air transportation, and had been on the short-list of sites for the Apollo program, the city could not have secured the winning bid for NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (later Johnson Space Center) without the critical lobbying of Johnson and Thomas. In Texas, the American frontier of the nineteenth century—the legendary Wild West—merged with the American frontier of the twentieth century—Outer Space, which previously existed only in our imagination. The first operational flight controlled from the new center was Gemini 4 in 1964. 

On June 3, 1965 Edward H. White II became the first American to step outside his spacecraft and let go, effectively setting himself adrift in the zero gravity of space. For 23 minutes White floated and maneuvered himself around the Gemini spacecraft while logging 6500 miles during his orbital stroll. White was attached to the spacecraft by a 25 foot umbilical line and a 23 foot tether line, both wrapped in gold tape to form one cord. In his right hand White carries a Hand Held Self Maneuvering Unit (HHSMU) which is used to move about the weightless environment of space. The visor of his helmet is gold plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.

Upon seeing the Earth "rise" above the lunar horizon, Frank Borman (Apollo 8) told mission control

in Houston, and the listening world, "This is the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life." The spectacular view of the whole planet Earth that the Apollo astronauts captured in photographs is credited with giving tremendous momentum to the then-nascent environmental movement. The power of seeing the Earth as one planet, rather than as separate nations and regions, has been cited again and again by the returning astronauts as among their most unforgettable experiences. Alan Shepard (Apollo 14) wrote that he understood how "the Earth seemed almost limitless to its people with its vast oceans and upheaving mountains, where there was always a distant horizon and changing dawns and sunsets. But from here, from the moon, it is, in fact, very finite, very fragile ... so incredibly fragile. That thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the world-it can be blown away so easily! A meteor, a cataclysmic volcano, man's own uncaring outpourings of poison..." Byron

K. Lichtenberg (Shuttle 9) acknowledged, "Your perspective really changes .... You don't see any of the borders, you don't see any of the cultures, you don't see the different languages....so there's the sense of no difference, just a subtle gentle blending from one region to the next."

American lunar photography was planned as three flight projects called Ranger, an impact (crash) craft; Orbiter, a moon-orbiting craft; and Surveyor, a soft-landing craft. This image was taken by Surveyor 1, the unmanned probe that orbited the Moon in 1966.

Thousands of photographs were taken either by traditional photographic systems or by television cameras, which were modified to work in space. All the pictures were electronically transmitted to Earth. The Orbiter spacecraft obtained high-resolution information of the lunar surface that proved essential to selecting landing sites for the Apollo missions as well as to studying the moon's surface.

At 4:17p.m. Eastern Standard Time, July 20, 1969, Neil A. Armstrong informed mission control: "Houston, Tranquility Base

here. The Eagle has landed." Eight years after President Kennedy's challenge, the crew of Apollo 11's lunar module, Eagle, climbed down its ladder to the moon's surface. Both Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. discovered that being on the moon and moving in one-sixth gravity was an exhilarating experience. Aldrin described himself as "buoyant and full of goose pimples." Because the moon's surface is fine and powdery, both Aldrin and Armstrong were able to leave clear footprints, which Armstrong recorded as unprecedented scientific and historic information.

Alan B. Shepard, Jr. was the first to exult, "I'm free!," when he first experienced weightlessness. Similarly, when speaking of his partner Alexei A. Leonov, who had just returned from the first space "walk," Cosmonaut Pavel I. Belyaev said, "He looks like a man who has just been reborn, a man who has just come back from another world." Edgar Mitchell said that walking on the moon was a "peak experience" for him, in which the "presence of divinity became almost palpable." 

This image presents an overhead view of the Skylab Orbital Workshop in Earth orbit as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Modules (CSM) during the final fly-around by the CSM before returning home. During launch on May 14, 1973, some 63 seconds into flight, the micrometeor shield on the Orbital Workshop (OWS) experienced a failure that caused it to be caught up in the supersonic air flow during ascent. This ripped the shield from the OWS and damaged the tie downs that secured one of the solar array systems. Complete loss of one of the solar arrays happened at 593 seconds when the exhaust plume from the S-II's separation rockets impacted the partially deployed solar array system. Without the micrometeoroid shield that was to protect against solar heating as well, temperatures inside the OWS rose to 126 degrees fahrenheit. The gold "parasol" clearly visible in the photo, was designed to replace the missing micrometeoroid shield, protecting the workshop against solar heating. The replacement solar shield was deployed by the Skylab I crew. This enabled the Skylab Orbital Workshop to fulfill all its mission objects serving as home to additional crews before being deorbited in 1978.

The United States's space shuttle is the world’s first reusable spacecraft, designed to fly like a rocket in space and like a glider in the atmosphere. Once the shuttle is in orbit, the astronauts can open the doors of the payload bay to perform experiments and tasks, such as retrieving, repairing, and/or launching satellites. A fifty-foot long remote manipulator arm assists in payload procedures.

The approximate size of a DC-9 airliner, the shuttle can carry a crew of nine as well as eighteen tons of cargo. Shuttle missions can last seven to ten days. The shuttle is also the first spacecraft designed to carry its crew back to a runway landing. If possible, shuttles land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but Edwards Air Force Base is also available, as are other bases worldwide. Then the shuttle is ferried to Florida on the back of a Boeing 747. 

Mars Pathfinder was designed to be a demonstration of the technology necessary to deliver a lander and a free-ranging robotic rover to the surface of Mars in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Pathfinder not only accomplished this goal but also returned an unprecedented amount of data and outlived its primary design life.

  From landing until the final data transmission on September 27, 1997, Mars Pathfinder returned 2.3 billion bits of information, including more than 16,500 images from the lander and 550 images from the rover, as well as more than 15 chemical analyses of rocks and soil and extensive data on winds and other weather factors. Findings form the investigations carried out by scientific instruments on both the lander and the rover suggest that Mars was at one time in its past warm and wet, with water existing in its liquid state and thicker atmosphere.

  This is an aerial image looking down at the surface of the planet Mars. A landrover has evidently recently rolled down a yellow ramp and has hit a nearby rock. A large black circle dominates the center of the image.