posted 07-25-2019 06:55 PM               

Past and present NASA artifacts are focus of photographer's new book

A new book captures humanity's connection to space exploration through the iconic artifacts it has and continues to create.

"NASA: Past and Present Dreams of the Future," by commercial photographer Benedict Redgrove, offers more than 200 images of the U.S. space agency's most recognizable objects in a way that they have never been seen before. Captured in high resolution and then digitally isolated from their backgrounds, the spacecraft, spacesuits and other hardware are shown without the distraction of their settings.

To publish "NASA: Past and Present Dreams of the Future," Redgrove turned to a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

posted 08-01-2019 11:32 AM               

Here they are, the first official shots of the cover. Subtle, clean, minimalist design, simple typography, debossed into the fabric cover.

posted 08-16-2019 10:22 AM               

About 24 hours after the ads were approved, he got a notification telling him the ad had been removed. He resubmitted it. It was accepted — and then removed again — 15 or 20 times, he said. The explanation given: He had run "misleading ads that resulted in high negative feedback."

He understood that it was Facebook's algorithm that rejected the ads, not a person. Getting additional answers proved difficult, a common complaint with advertising on Facebook. The best clues he could find came in the comments under the ads, which he and his colleagues captured in screenshots before they were removed and in responses to other posts about the project: There were phrases such as "The original moon landing was faking" and "It's all a show," along with memes mocking space technology. Some comments were hard to gauge, with users insisting that the earth was flat but that they'd buy the book anyway.

...an upside of all this, Mr. Redgrove said, was that when project supporters learned about the campaign to take down the ads, they took it upon themselves to advertise his project. With four days to go as of Wednesday morning, he was just $1,435 shy of his goal. "Flat earthers," he said, "got us a bigger audience."