Last mission covered was: STS 77 on 17/9/2004
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GUY PARRY'S RARE
SHUTTLE PAYLOAD-BAY
PHOTO ARCHIVE
Last mission covered was: STS 77 on 17/9/2004
This site is dedicated to the memory of my beloved Alaskan Malamute, Kaygin, and to the "Challenger 7", especially Christa McAuliffe, Mike Smith & Greg Jarvis, who never made it all the way...and now the crew of Columbia.
Bad news: update on a dead hobby...
In short,
the third visit is off and there is no longer any practical way for me to maintain this
site. The new security regulations are a grievous insult to anyone who believes in
freedom and friendship - as America supposedly does. NASA talks about
'Outreach Programs' and the need to get members of the public interested in space
exploration? STRANGE way to go about it, if you ask me...
To explain, here is an excerpt from an email sent by Eileen Hawley - head of Security(?) at JSC - ca 2002:
1. The escort requirement remains in effect throughout
any visit to the center, whether you are inside a building or in transit on the center. We
try to be as reasonable as possible within our rules requirement. Depending on the
physical location of the building in question, if our escort can keep
you in sight while you are working at the light table, there is no issue. However, no
visitor is permitted to be in a room that is not in line of
sight of an escort.
2. As I mentioned in my previous email to you, we may be able to accommodate visits of two
to four hours maximum for two or three days, but
nothing longer than that. Even if the escort requirement is minimal, with our employees
being able to keep you in line of sight, escorting does still
take employees away from their normal duties. We can't absorb a 40-hour escort and still
serve our other clients.
Translation: Even if you travel all the way across the Pacific and arrive here at JSC there's no guarantee that we will be able to find a security guard to escort you to the Media Relations buildings even once...
A little bit of personal history
I have been fascinated - obsessed, more like it - by the idea of human spaceflight ever since I can remember gazing up at the moon when I was 3 years old. Unfortunately, poor eyesight meant I never had a chance of realising my dream of trying to become an astronaut, or at the very least joining a major airline as a commercial pilot. I recently spent $5,000 having corrective surgery to remedy the problem, but it's much too late now. Still, my interest has never waned, and I subscribed for over ten years to the best spaceflight publications around: the BIS's SPACEFLIGHT, Dixon Otto's excellent COUNTDOWN, the short-lived SPACEFLIGHT NEWS, etc, at least as long as they existed or maintained content that made them worth paying for; eg, good color photographs.
What drove me to distraction was the lack of good pictures of the payload bays for some of the missions. To my way of thinking, what makes a flight interesting is not the people aboard but what gets carried up into orbit. I wanted to see a picture of the PLB before anything aboard was actually deployed or the Remote Manipulator System had been unstowed: Ulysses, Galilieo or the several TDRS flights, to name a few. Yet these magazines continually failed to print the shots I wanted, often ignoring the Spacelab module exteriors entirely in this regard, and in the end I was forced to visit the Johnson Space Centre in person in 1995, where I had made some good contacts via email, so I could collect these shots in person!
I discovered to my horror that the ones I was primarily interested in hadn't appeared in print for a good reason: they had never been taken in the first place. Yes, hard though it is to believe, the astronauts aboard some of the most interesting flights, such as STS-34 and STS-41, had simply failed to take any shots in either 35mm OR 70mm of the two probes aboard before releasing them! In stark contast, some lovely pictures were taken of Magellan both before and during tilt-table elevation, not only during deployment. Next year I will be back to JSC to try and find any cine footage of those missions in an attempt to fill my collection out. Fingers-crossed some film was taken of the interplanetary probes carried aloft by those two particular flights...am I being paranoid in wondering if the omission is due to them carrying RTG's in clear view and the possibility of anti-nuclear backlash???
If I've been driven mad by these missing photos I have to assume other space fans out there have, too. This page is an attempt to create an historical archive of all the non-secret Shuttle missions through their payload-bay photos, especially the rarely-seen shots you won't have ever spotted in print before: a picture of the Hubble Space Telescope or the Gamma Ray Observatory in the PLB before being lifted out by the 'robot arm', for example. Some are superb. Others I would regard as very ordinary; the astronauts aren't professional photographers, and sometimes it shows!
Selection criteria for the photographs
To qualify, each shot needed to avoid having the top of the tail clipped off, be roughly centered, have the RMS latched down and preferrably have the Earth's limb somewhere in-frame, although this was sometimes not possible. Some suitable images were 35mm frames whilst others were square 70mm Hasselblad shots. To keep my collection a uniform size I have cropped these to make them 5x7! I estimate that between 80%-90% of these pictures have never been digitized; in many cases this will be the FIRST TIME they have ever appeared online. Sometime in the future I will burn a CD of them all: send me a SSAE and I'll mail it back full.
Here are a few thumbnails to show you the sort of shots I've endeavored to collect, that most of you will have never seen:
STS-1: 
Spacelab D-1: 
Magellan: 
HST: 
GRO: 
UARS: 
Atlas-3: 
ACTS: 
USMP-2: 
MIR-1:
STS-77: 
LMS: 
MIR-5: 
AXAF: 
ISS Flights:
STS-101:
STS-111: 
STS-112: 
** A couple of 'fantasy' pics, in lieu of the real thing
In
the past, few missions returned to Earth without at least *one* decent-quality still image
showing the payload-bay and its contents. Since STS-107 this has changed, and not
for the better. The PLB stills from STS-114 were generally poor. Sure, s114e5196.jpg
was taken, but fortunately s114e5198.jpg had the camera held 'landscape' style, albeit
with the tail cut off. Even s121e07909.jpg
is a 'down' pic, taken post-docking and missing an item from the ICC cargo carrier which
was there when they lifted off. On the left is a Photoshopped combination of
the two 114 shots. Amazingly, NO payload-bay pics were taken on STS-117 at all, nor
on STS-115(!) On the right is a heavily Photoshopped version of s115e5305.jpg
to show what that flight *might* have looked like.
Crews *are* still using film, but only digital ones are being
placed on NASA's HSF - Human Spaceflight - site. Film images (as opposed to ESC
digital ones) hopefully exist, but obtaining them is an on-going, time-consuming process.
s114e5198: 
s115e05305: 
Also, some "missing" ISS approach images
For some reason there were no 'approach' pics posted on the NASA gallery for mission STS-104, the Quest airlock flight, and STS-102. Here are a couple I managed to get. I have not been able to obtain similar hi-res pics for STS 63, nor any of the Spacehab/Mir flights with the exception of STS 76 [NM21-724-042.jpg] which was on a NASA site, of all places. Must have been put there by mistake...
1/ ISS002E9384: 
2/ STS102 - ISS001-701-333: 
In lieu of digital stills:
STS116: 
STS122: 
"Three Days at Woomera"
This article appeared in the Nov 2001 issue of 'Novosti Kosmonavtiki'
* For the Russian version, click here: page 1 and here: page 2
* To read the original in English, visit here
Buran - the Russians had a Space Shuttle?
* Click here for a look at the USSR's MKS Shuttle Program
My Science Fiction
Over the past 20 years I have written six short stories and three full-length novels - The Fertile Crescent, Stranger, my Brother and A Sunburnt Country - all set in my Commonwealth of Humanity future history. I write strongly character-based fiction, not trendy cyberpunk or derivitive fantasy-type rubbish. Unfortunately, there seems to be no market for this sort of story. After nearly 50 query letters I have been ripped off for US$300 and not received any positive criticism whatsoever. If anyone knows the true way to earn a publishing contract in these days of unimaginitive pseudo-fantasy, please let me in on the secret...
Lastly, a few of my favourite space-related links
* Spaceflight Now: http://spaceflightnow.com/index.html
* Florida Today: http://www.flatoday.com/news/space/
* Go Taikonauts!: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/1921/
* Jacqmans Spaceflight Homepage: http://www.angelfire.com/fl/Jacqmans/
* Apollo Lunar Surface Journal: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/main.html
Found any pesky bugs? 
LET ME KNOW:
pargoo@netspace.net.au
This Space Exploration Web Ring site is owned by Guy Parry. Want to join the Space Exploration Web Ring? |
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