Thursday, June 17, 2010

NASA Flickr Fun!

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A space-enthusiast Flickr user named ParkerNow uploaded a gallery of photographs from many eras of NASAs existence. Some of these are well-known images featured in popular magazines, and others are freely available on NASA's public galleries... but many were brand new to my eyes (and that's a bit a trick these days.)

Just when you think you've seen every NASA photo out there! Across 20 pages of sets, he has nearly 1200 photos, which he says a friend gave him on a CD many years ago -- and he just found it again. So funny to think they were state-of-the-art at the time!

Lunar Module
Lunar Module Quality Assurance

Some of my favorites are the QA teams working on space crafts and rovers in the 1960s, resplendent in their "clean room" gear! Others are hilarious shots of technicians and flight controllers working on [what now look like] utterly ancient consoles and/or computer systems.

Can you believe we got 12 guys to the moon with that stuff? There is more technology in a single iPod now.

I was very surprised that I did not recognize many of the Apollo program photos, because I had just assumed over the years that BY NOW, I've seen everything ever published. Between Time magazine and the NASA.gov site alone -- I guess I thought I was covered. But some of these are truly priceless...

Apollo 12
Alan Bean, Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad
Apollo 12 - November 1969

There are even photos of contemporary Russian hardware, early rocket designs, snaps from the first moon and Mars orbiters, early Shuttle program history from the 1980s, and much more.

I wish I could feature about 50 of them here...! But, it's easier to scroll through the actual Flickr site...

You can start at the top of his Photostream to see large thumbnails, or go to his main gallery where there are more thumbnails per page to choose from. Either way, it's the best hour you'll kill today on the internet!