The ‘Apollo 11’ space mission team first landed on the moon in 1969.
It blends images that are well known with long lost gems found in a National Archives warehouse and digitised for the first time. The captivating shots were a few of the many found on 177 65mm reels uncovered by Dan Rooney, supervisory archivist of the National Archives film section. “The real discovery part was in the research that led us to a lot of new information about the content and the quality of the material.”The 65mm and 70mm were considered the luxury format of their time, used in cinema in the 1950s and 1960s.NASA probably didn’t use the reels “because of the difficulty of working with these large formats, and they probably lacked the equipment and the expertise,” said Rooney.
In the firing room and at mission control in Houston, rows and rows of male engineers are seen in white shirts and dark ties, as opposed to the somewhat more gender balanced teams at NASA and SpaceX today. The film’s success lies in its seamless combination of the iconic and the re-discovered in a single, fluid narrative, occasionally seen on split-screens.