So it was the early astronauts that kind of drove the desire to take cameras themselves, but they were quite basic. Wally Schirra (Mercury-Atlas 8) then took the first Hasselblad. He wanted medium format, better quality, but really, the photographs from Mercury aren’t as stunning as Gemini. It’s partly the windows and the way they took the photos, and they’d had little experience. Also, preservation clearly wasn’t high up on the agenda in Mercury, because the original film is evidently in a pretty bad state. The first American in space is an incredibly important moment in history. But every single frame of the original film of Alan Shepard’s flight
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