Photo Credit: Voyageur Press
Moonshots: 50 Years of NASA Space Exploration Seen through Hasselblad Cameras by Piers Bizony is a stunningly beautiful and insightful book that brings the story of America’s journey into space to life. And with each passing year, its message will only grow more poignant.
“Time is doing what it always does: separating us from the tangibility of events,” the introduction reads — and it’s true, especially for those who, like me, were born into a world where man had already walked on the Moon. So many people today accept spaceflight as a simple reality that it’s easy to forget or even imagine the challenges, fears, and exhilarations of those first steps. That number will only increase with time.
But regardless of age, I’d like to think there is still something compelling and awe-inspiring when we think about what it was like to experience those steps from inside the boots of an astronaut.
A picture is worth a thousand words. And like you, I’m sure, I’ve seen plenty of spaceflight photos. From the early Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions to the images we receive from the International Space Station today, pictures from space have permeated and changed our lives.
But the photos in this book are nothing like what you see on a screen or even a museum display – they are crisp, colorful, and alive in an in-your-face way that I can’t say I’ve really experienced before. Moonshots covers it all, from the origins of the space race to the establishment of the space shuttle program and the birth of the International Space Station. While the book’s main focus is the earlier era of spaceflight, it nonetheless carries the reader into more recent events by highlighting the early days of the programs that remain pertinent to this day, and will remain relevant well into the future.
The book itself is large — the perfect size for a coffee table volume — and features a thick, exquisitely-designed slipcase with Moon phase cutouts that reveal the cover inside. The vast majority of the volume is given over to photographs, with scattered text providing additional history, insight, and personality that truly highlights the human aspect of spaceflight. It contains 240 pages, front to back, and even the inside covers feature the same kind of rich imagery that will have you opening this volume over and over again. It also includes an index for easy location of any image or subject.
Moonshots provides some of the most beautiful, high-quality imagery I’ve ever seen to accompany humanity’s amazing story of reaching the stars through ingenuity, perseverance, and curiosity. I highly recommend adding it to your collection.
Moonshots: 50 Years of NASA Space Exploration Seen Through Hasselblad Cameras
By Piers Bizony
Publisher: Voyageur Press
ISBN: 978-0-7603-5262-5
$75.00 US | £60.00 UK | $98.00 CAN