7 ms·

>All this camera hacking was done hastily just days before the mission and on a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy. That's a bit unkind. $40

by ginko 4y ago

>All this camera hacking was done hastily just days before the mission and on a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy. That's a bit unkind. $40 in 1962 is would be about $400 adjusting for inflation and those Minolta fixed lens rangefinders were excellent cameras and pretty much state of the art consumer cameras, especially the auto-exposure. Of course it's no Nikon F or Hasselblad (those went to the moon later-on) but you could do a lot worse in 1962.

adolph 4y ago
Just adjusting for inflation is not charitable. A $400 commercially available camera today would be about $0.25 adjusting for NASA. If it were for military use it would be the equivalent of $0.10.
- Retric 4y ago
  Hardly NASA has a long history of getting good value for money. Just look at their funding of SpaceX and how cheap many of their probes have been. The shuttle was something of a rare exception, but it was also infected by the DoD’s requirements. Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.
  - hungryforcodes 4y ago
    The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it. All the other solutions currently are just kind of space buses (for equipment and people). There are different estimates for the shuttle launch costs -- between $500m - $1.5b. However for LEO there couldn't be anything more useful. The SLS launch costs run between $2b - $4b. It hasn't done anything useful so far...
    - t344344 4y ago
      Right, unless it breaks and Americans have to launch from Kazakhstan :) There were two spy satellites with the same mirror diameter as Hubble. Launched by normal rockets! Without spending money on shuttle, US could launch new Hubble every 5 years or so! > Both NRO space telescopes have a main mirror nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), rivaling the Hubble Space Telescope, https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-nasa.html https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...
    - outworlder 4y ago
      > The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it. I'll concede that NASA did an excellent job, all things considered. The Shuttle itself was terrible(although gorgeous) but that's not NASA's fault. They had to get money from the Air Force so they were subject to Air Force requirements, like the incredible cross range capabilities and the oversized cargo hold. Then there were other requirements – like having to build solid rocket boosters from far away locations and transport by train, purely to get political support – that caused further problems. NASA didn't even want to use solid rockets in the first place. The Soviet Buran copied the project (without SRBs) even though it made zero sense to them – but the US obviously had a reason to develop such a vehicle, so they wanted to be ready. Their Energia rocket worked better without an orbiter attached. What NASA actually wanted to build would have been incredible. Sure, maybe the cargo hold would have been smaller, but if it could have a lower turnaround time and cost less to refurbish after every launch, maybe it would still be operational. The SLS is also bogged down by politicians. And still uses the accursed SRBs.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The shuttle worked, which was amazing considering everything it could do. But the program was a huge money pit because the shuttle had so much capability that went unused on most missions. You can quibble about the numbers, but a rough calculation puts the program at US$196 billion in 2011 or ~262B in 2023 dollars for 135 attempted flights. So 2B per flight in todays money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program SLS is aiming for 130t to LEO vs 27.5t to LEO for the Shuttle. 4B a launch would have less than half the shuttle’s cost per kg to LEO, if it’s roughly 2B that’s almost 5 times the cargo for the same budget. Granted the shuttle sent people up on every mission, but spending 60m/person to the ISS lets them stay in orbit for vastly less money / day. Essentially the shuttle launched and returned a large useful space into orbit, but then returned it at the end of every mission, which was extremely expensive. Both the SLS and shuttle have their advantages but the shuttle was only really useful for LEO as getting that much mass into higher orbits was untenable despite what various movies have suggested.
  - smegsicle 4y ago
    > NASA has a long history of getting good value for money like how apollo made do without a luxury fourth gimbal as in gemini
  - adolph 4y ago
    > Just look at their funding of SpaceX and . . . compare it to the funding of their actual priority: the series of Constellation: Ares, SLS: Orion. Just look at how despite their best efforts, they accidentally funded something successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportation_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
  - ChancyChance 4y ago
    > Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives. Exactly. I find it ignorant when people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money. If NASA played fast and lose (move fast and break things), people would die and shit would explode, and they'd get crucified by congress. Private companies play the risk game because they don't have to meet the same extremely high bar of safety that a government org does. I'm not saying there's some waste, but it is a complex process for a reason. Does it go too far, perhaps: I've fallen into ISO hell before, and it can be mind numbing, but maybe I'm just not smart enough to be the person reading those docs.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money The Shuttle and SLS jaded people. Of course, NASA didn't cause those. The military and Congress, respectively, did.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      One of the issues with NASA is that the centers are a source of alot of political capital for their congressional sponsors. So things get funded on that basis. The big deal made about it is because government is more transparent. Big companies are often far more wasteful of shareholder dollars, but they generally don’t have boards as insane as congress.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      NASA destroyed a shuttle on more than 1% of all shuttle flights, each time killing everyone aboard.
      - ChancyChance 4y ago
        Or to put in another way, NASA only had two shuttle disasters. Two is such a small number, right? Funny now numbers can be used. However I can see the glaringly obvious omission in my post that NASA, in its near 70 years of existence has had numerous casualties and explosions. But that's literally my gist: massive checklists, standards, and regulations are a result of that.
DavidAdams 4y ago
I think it's worth mentioning that a nice Nikon or Leica in 1965 would have cost about $400. So they modified a "cheap" camera that cost about 1/10th the price of a "nice" camera.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah that was probably at the lower end of "real" rangefinder cameras. I'm guessing even something like a Kodak Retina would have been considerably more expensive. I'm not sure what the real mass market consumer cameras were. Brownies from Kodak I guess--Instamatics were only introduced in 1963. Of course, part of the answer is that photography was a lot less mass market in the early 60s.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Real mass-market cameras for this era would have been things like the Kodak Pony line or Argus C3 (aka "the brick"), or the brownie box cameras you mentioned. https://mikeeckman.com/2022/05/kodak-pony-135-model-c-1955/ https://mikeeckman.com/2022/05/kodak-pony-135-model-c-1955/ https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135 https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_C3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_C3 Anyway just as a general statement, photography was a mass-market thing throughout most of the 20th century - it just wasn't the glamorous pro-tier cameras that we still remember and care about today. Kodak in particular always catered to the low-end, getting cameras in people's hands to get them using Kodak film was their bread and butter, it was very much a "give away the razor, sell the blades" at least in the low-end market. (and they introduced 620 and 628 film with different spool sizes to try and brand-lock you to Kodak! Today some cameras can be converted, or you can clip down the rim of the spool, or rewind 120 film (in a darkroom/darkbag) onto the 620 spool. It's a little bit smaller spool which can cause problems with film spacing on "automatic" cameras, but, red-window style cameras don't care, or you can use a 620 spool on the takeup.) In the early days it was "postcard cameras" shooting 122 film (bigger than 120!) that would be contact-printed onto postcards, typically either folding cameras or box cameras (the latter being even simpler and cheaper - brownie launched at one dollar in 1900). Later, this evolved into viewfinder cameras/point-and-shoots. https://postcardhistory.net/2022/09/the-kodak-model-3a-postcard-camera-and-the-velox-postal/ https://postcardhistory.net/2022/09/the-kodak-model-3a-postc... https://mymodernmet.com/kodak-brownie-camera/ https://mymodernmet.com/kodak-brownie-camera/ But if you are contact printing (effectively 1:1 enlargement - the print is the same size as the negative), or enlarging only a small amount onto a 4x6 or 5x7 print, the lens isn't that critical. Meniscus is fine, rapid rectilinear or triplet is good, tessar is premium. Similarly, when you are shooting B+W film, a vague "instant" (usually about 1/100, sometimes 1/60) shutter setting is fine... the exposure latitude will cover you even though you're not perfectly on. And it was sensational being able to send a picture of your own family through the mail on a postcard, like you were a movie star or something! Very very popular for the time. And even then there were models that specialized in getting relatively decent quality at minimal cost, like the Argus C3. Definitely a cost-optimized camera but I doubt you could get anything better at the prices it sold at. Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this - yes, a leica or a rolleiflex or a kodak retina or a contax was quite expensive, not a mass-market thing at all! But 90% of everything is crap, it always has been (it's equally true of PC hardware today, f.ex), and we forget about the Kodak Pony 135s and the crappy box cameras with meniscus lenses and guillotine shutters because they're crap. But those were the mass-market products of their day. (I'm sure you know this, iirc we've interacted on photo threads before, I just like sharing. ;) But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit, box cameras and cheapo bakelite viewfinder stuff has been a thing for a long time and it's easy to forget that with survivor bias.)
williamDafoe 4y ago
Yeah full frame cameras like the Minolta himatic viewfinder model were considered entry level back then. Thank God the mission wasn't delayed by one year because Kodak developed the truly terrible instamatic 126 camera in 1963, with awful resolution and picture quality ...
- pulvinar 4y ago
  I can vouch for that-- I still have my Agfamatic 126 from the mid 60's which may look like the $40 camera (same selenium meter), but it always took crappy pictures. Nothing close to John Glenn's. The Argus C3 did though.
WalterBright 4y ago
I just sold my mom's Mamiya 6, in perfect condition, for $30. It's a pretty nice camera for a 1950's era machine. Too bad it's just worthless today.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by ginko 4y ago

adolph 4y ago

Just adjusting for inflation is not charitable. A $400 commercially available camera today would be about $0.25 adjusting for NASA. If it were for military use it would be the equivalent of $0.10.

Retric 4y ago
Hardly NASA has a long history of getting good value for money. Just look at their funding of SpaceX and how cheap many of their probes have been. The shuttle was something of a rare exception, but it was also infected by the DoD’s requirements. Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.
- hungryforcodes 4y ago
  The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it. All the other solutions currently are just kind of space buses (for equipment and people). There are different estimates for the shuttle launch costs -- between $500m - $1.5b. However for LEO there couldn't be anything more useful. The SLS launch costs run between $2b - $4b. It hasn't done anything useful so far...
  - t344344 4y ago
    Right, unless it breaks and Americans have to launch from Kazakhstan :) There were two spy satellites with the same mirror diameter as Hubble. Launched by normal rockets! Without spending money on shuttle, US could launch new Hubble every 5 years or so! > Both NRO space telescopes have a main mirror nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), rivaling the Hubble Space Telescope, https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-nasa.html https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it. I'll concede that NASA did an excellent job, all things considered. The Shuttle itself was terrible(although gorgeous) but that's not NASA's fault. They had to get money from the Air Force so they were subject to Air Force requirements, like the incredible cross range capabilities and the oversized cargo hold. Then there were other requirements – like having to build solid rocket boosters from far away locations and transport by train, purely to get political support – that caused further problems. NASA didn't even want to use solid rockets in the first place. The Soviet Buran copied the project (without SRBs) even though it made zero sense to them – but the US obviously had a reason to develop such a vehicle, so they wanted to be ready. Their Energia rocket worked better without an orbiter attached. What NASA actually wanted to build would have been incredible. Sure, maybe the cargo hold would have been smaller, but if it could have a lower turnaround time and cost less to refurbish after every launch, maybe it would still be operational. The SLS is also bogged down by politicians. And still uses the accursed SRBs.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The shuttle worked, which was amazing considering everything it could do. But the program was a huge money pit because the shuttle had so much capability that went unused on most missions. You can quibble about the numbers, but a rough calculation puts the program at US$196 billion in 2011 or ~262B in 2023 dollars for 135 attempted flights. So 2B per flight in todays money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program SLS is aiming for 130t to LEO vs 27.5t to LEO for the Shuttle. 4B a launch would have less than half the shuttle’s cost per kg to LEO, if it’s roughly 2B that’s almost 5 times the cargo for the same budget. Granted the shuttle sent people up on every mission, but spending 60m/person to the ISS lets them stay in orbit for vastly less money / day. Essentially the shuttle launched and returned a large useful space into orbit, but then returned it at the end of every mission, which was extremely expensive. Both the SLS and shuttle have their advantages but the shuttle was only really useful for LEO as getting that much mass into higher orbits was untenable despite what various movies have suggested.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  > NASA has a long history of getting good value for money like how apollo made do without a luxury fourth gimbal as in gemini
- adolph 4y ago
  > Just look at their funding of SpaceX and . . . compare it to the funding of their actual priority: the series of Constellation: Ares, SLS: Orion. Just look at how despite their best efforts, they accidentally funded something successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportation_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
- ChancyChance 4y ago
  > Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives. Exactly. I find it ignorant when people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money. If NASA played fast and lose (move fast and break things), people would die and shit would explode, and they'd get crucified by congress. Private companies play the risk game because they don't have to meet the same extremely high bar of safety that a government org does. I'm not saying there's some waste, but it is a complex process for a reason. Does it go too far, perhaps: I've fallen into ISO hell before, and it can be mind numbing, but maybe I'm just not smart enough to be the person reading those docs.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money The Shuttle and SLS jaded people. Of course, NASA didn't cause those. The military and Congress, respectively, did.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    One of the issues with NASA is that the centers are a source of alot of political capital for their congressional sponsors. So things get funded on that basis. The big deal made about it is because government is more transparent. Big companies are often far more wasteful of shareholder dollars, but they generally don’t have boards as insane as congress.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    NASA destroyed a shuttle on more than 1% of all shuttle flights, each time killing everyone aboard.
    - ChancyChance 4y ago
      Or to put in another way, NASA only had two shuttle disasters. Two is such a small number, right? Funny now numbers can be used. However I can see the glaringly obvious omission in my post that NASA, in its near 70 years of existence has had numerous casualties and explosions. But that's literally my gist: massive checklists, standards, and regulations are a result of that.

DavidAdams 4y ago

I think it's worth mentioning that a nice Nikon or Leica in 1965 would have cost about $400. So they modified a "cheap" camera that cost about 1/10th the price of a "nice" camera.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah that was probably at the lower end of "real" rangefinder cameras. I'm guessing even something like a Kodak Retina would have been considerably more expensive. I'm not sure what the real mass market consumer cameras were. Brownies from Kodak I guess--Instamatics were only introduced in 1963. Of course, part of the answer is that photography was a lot less mass market in the early 60s.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Real mass-market cameras for this era would have been things like the Kodak Pony line or Argus C3 (aka "the brick"), or the brownie box cameras you mentioned. https://mikeeckman.com/2022/05/kodak-pony-135-model-c-1955/ https://mikeeckman.com/2022/05/kodak-pony-135-model-c-1955/ https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135 https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_C3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_C3 Anyway just as a general statement, photography was a mass-market thing throughout most of the 20th century - it just wasn't the glamorous pro-tier cameras that we still remember and care about today. Kodak in particular always catered to the low-end, getting cameras in people's hands to get them using Kodak film was their bread and butter, it was very much a "give away the razor, sell the blades" at least in the low-end market. (and they introduced 620 and 628 film with different spool sizes to try and brand-lock you to Kodak! Today some cameras can be converted, or you can clip down the rim of the spool, or rewind 120 film (in a darkroom/darkbag) onto the 620 spool. It's a little bit smaller spool which can cause problems with film spacing on "automatic" cameras, but, red-window style cameras don't care, or you can use a 620 spool on the takeup.) In the early days it was "postcard cameras" shooting 122 film (bigger than 120!) that would be contact-printed onto postcards, typically either folding cameras or box cameras (the latter being even simpler and cheaper - brownie launched at one dollar in 1900). Later, this evolved into viewfinder cameras/point-and-shoots. https://postcardhistory.net/2022/09/the-kodak-model-3a-postcard-camera-and-the-velox-postal/ https://postcardhistory.net/2022/09/the-kodak-model-3a-postc... https://mymodernmet.com/kodak-brownie-camera/ https://mymodernmet.com/kodak-brownie-camera/ But if you are contact printing (effectively 1:1 enlargement - the print is the same size as the negative), or enlarging only a small amount onto a 4x6 or 5x7 print, the lens isn't that critical. Meniscus is fine, rapid rectilinear or triplet is good, tessar is premium. Similarly, when you are shooting B+W film, a vague "instant" (usually about 1/100, sometimes 1/60) shutter setting is fine... the exposure latitude will cover you even though you're not perfectly on. And it was sensational being able to send a picture of your own family through the mail on a postcard, like you were a movie star or something! Very very popular for the time. And even then there were models that specialized in getting relatively decent quality at minimal cost, like the Argus C3. Definitely a cost-optimized camera but I doubt you could get anything better at the prices it sold at. Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this - yes, a leica or a rolleiflex or a kodak retina or a contax was quite expensive, not a mass-market thing at all! But 90% of everything is crap, it always has been (it's equally true of PC hardware today, f.ex), and we forget about the Kodak Pony 135s and the crappy box cameras with meniscus lenses and guillotine shutters because they're crap. But those were the mass-market products of their day. (I'm sure you know this, iirc we've interacted on photo threads before, I just like sharing. ;) But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit, box cameras and cheapo bakelite viewfinder stuff has been a thing for a long time and it's easy to forget that with survivor bias.)

williamDafoe 4y ago

Yeah full frame cameras like the Minolta himatic viewfinder model were considered entry level back then. Thank God the mission wasn't delayed by one year because Kodak developed the truly terrible instamatic 126 camera in 1963, with awful resolution and picture quality ...

pulvinar 4y ago
I can vouch for that-- I still have my Agfamatic 126 from the mid 60's which may look like the $40 camera (same selenium meter), but it always took crappy pictures. Nothing close to John Glenn's. The Argus C3 did though.

WalterBright 4y ago

I just sold my mom's Mamiya 6, in perfect condition, for $30. It's a pretty nice camera for a 1950's era machine. Too bad it's just worthless today.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]