Space exploration's golden age was arguably at its very start, when ambition was boundless and progress came in great strides.
A massive collection of vintage photos from this era went up for auction on February 26 at London's Bloomsbury Auction.
The nearly 700 photographs — original prints, not reproductions — come from the collection of a single European collector.
The auction lasted nearly ten hours and brought in a total of £489,440, (or more than $755,500) from more than 300 bidders.
Here are 21 of them, in chronological order, starting in 1946 with the first image of Earth from space.
On October 24, 1946, mankind got its first photograph taken from outer space, at an altitude of 65 miles. A camera attached to a V-2 Rocket, a product of German engineering during World War II, was set up to snap a photo every second and a half. The rocket crashed back to Earth, its film roll kept safe by a steel casing.
Ed White was the first American astronaut to take a spacewalk, on June 3 1965. A cosmonaut (as Soviet space explorers are called) by the name of Alexei Leonov beat him to it by almost three months — though Leonov had a brush with death to do so, as he was forced to let oxygen out of his suit before reentering his spacecraft. Spacewalks are an important part of an astronaut's toolkit, who exit their vessels in order to make repairs on the outside.
Another shot of Ed White's historic spacewalk. "You looked like you were in your mother’s womb," White's copilot James McDivitt later told him.
Source: Bloomsbury Auctions
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