Posts: 63
From: Atlanta, GA, USA
Registered: Jul 2021

posted 05-06-2026 05:46 AM               

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I recently had an incredible five-hour lunch with a propulsion engineer friend of mine and one of his friends, retired NASA scientist and astrobiology expert from Marshall Space Flight Center, Professor Richard B. Hoover.

He worked on Apollo under Wernher von Braun, Skylab and later went on to to specialize in finding life in extreme places like Antarctica. He was principle investigator on a NASA experiment that took the first X-Ray pictures of the sun by launching cameras on a sounder rocket aimed into the sun.

He brought and showed us one of the cameras, which was a Pentax medium-format body and a Pentax film back.

My question is would something like this be collectible if it came with actual prints from the experiment and a copy of the resulting scientific paper from the data it collected? Would there be any considerable value added other than what a used Pentax 4x5 goes for on the secondary market? Any thoughts on non-Hasselblad cameras like this would be appreciated.