Posts: 88
From: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Registered: Apr 2019

posted 12-23-2019 08:46 AM               

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I have heard it said that NASA had no plans to carry a camera aboard John Glenn's Mercury flight in 1962. Because of this, Glenn went out and bought a camera just a short time before the mission. Engineers in the crew systems division examined Glenn's camera and made some modifications to it so it would be easier for Glenn to use.

Having said that, I have seen pictures from Alan Shepard's Mercury-Redstone flight. So obviously a camera of some kind was aboard Shepard's spacecraft. Then Wally Schirra for his flight recommended that a Hasselblad camera be used.

What was NASA's position on whether to have a camera aboard the Mercury spacecraft?

Also Apollo 7 carried the first tv camera aboard an Apollo spacecraft and Apollo 10 carried the first color tv camera Did Apollo 8 or 9 have a tv camera?

Posts: 853
From: Danville, Ohio
Registered: Dec 2002

posted 12-23-2019 12:51 PM               

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Photos from Freedom 7 would have been taken by an automatic camera placed at the window to the right of the hatch (when looking at the hatch from the outside, spacecraft nose up).

Apollo 8 certainly had a black and white TV camera, among other things giving us the haunting lunar surface imagery with the reading of chapters from the Book of Genesis.

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From: U.K.
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Posts: 905
From: Perth, Western Australia
Registered: Apr 2015

posted 12-24-2019 07:29 AM               

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Ralph Morse, along with other photographers who were tasked with photographing the Mercury astronauts and space program, were approached by Schirra and Slayton about camera designs of the time that would be suitable for use within the spacecraft.

Schirra discusses this in his oral history project interview and also states that it was he and Deke Slayton that had wanted to take a hand held camera into space to photograph the views from orbit.

Glenn's modified camera used on his first orbital mission was not a Hasselblad camera, which was selected following the advice of Morse and co., and were modified by the Pan Am lab for use in the confined vehicle.

I have not seen any particular line taken by NASA about what type of camera, or even if a camera was to be carried by the crew, however doing so did not do the program any harm.

Posts: 729
From: South Carolina
Registered: Jul 2006

posted 12-24-2019 08:14 AM               

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In the 1988 book The View From Space Glenn recalled talking to Dr. Robert Gilruth about taking some pictures during the flight of Friendship 7. Glenn said that Gilruth "felt that to have something as momentous as that first flight and not have any pictures to let people share in the view was a little bit ridiculous. So he made the decision that we would take a camera."

Glenn recalled that he wanted a camera that would let him hold it, trip the shutter and advance the film with his right hand, so he talked to Ralph Morse, who made some suggestions. They also worked with some people in the laboratory to put hand-held mechanisms on some different cameras. Then one day Glenn found a 35mm Ansco Autoset in a drugstore and bought it to compare with the others. He tried the different cameras with his suit glove on and ended up selecting the drugstore camera. During the flight he shot 38 frames of Kodacolor negative film.

On subsequent flights, according to the book, Carpenter exposed 200 frames with a Robot Recorder 35mm camera, and Schirra (who called the earlier cameras "dinky") flew a 70mm Hasselblad that he and Cooper had stripped down and modified. Cooper took a similarly-modified Hasselblad on his flight. Cooper, an avid photographer, said he wished they could have put a 4x5 camera aboard, but there wasn't enough room.

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