Forgotten Photos From the Space Shuttle’s Glory Days

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 Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But he didn’t shoot Challenger’s last mission. The launch was delayed repeatedly because of cold weather, and the day before the shuttle finally took off on Jan. 28, 1986, he decided not to shoot since he had plans to go out of town. More cold weather was expected that morning, and Chakeres was sure NASA wouldn’t proceed. But when he awoke and learned that the agency was moving ahead, he went to watch—still without his cameras. Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its 10th mission. “It was hard to continue the work after witnessing this accident, and I decided to set the project aside. For more than 25 years these negatives were kept in storage,” Chakeres writes in First Fleet: NASA’s Space Shuttle Program 1981-1986, a book of his work to be published in September (Daylight Books, $50).