Forgotten Images From The Shuttle's Glory Days

 

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As a kid growing up in the 1960s, John A. Chakeres would persuade his mother to let him stay home from school to watch space launches; using his father’s Rolleiflex camera, he’d take pictures of the TV. This was the beginning of his obsession with NASA, and it would lead him to get his B.F.A. in photography in 1975. The next manned spaceflights wouldn’t happen for six years, however.

Chakeres’s first successful attempt at photographing a launch— after a couple of false starts—came on March 22, 1982, the third voyage of Columbia. Over the next four years he shot Discovery, Atlantis, and Challenger multiple times at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But he didn’t shoot