>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I actually used my dad's old Pony for a time but got his German-made Kodak Retina IIIc when he went the SLR route. I had a lot of good use out of that and used it alongside my later SLR through most of college when some of the mechanisms finally wore to the point they couldn't be repaired.
>Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this
Yeah, there may be cult exceptions but most of the cameras considered collectibles today were probably at least moderately expensive when they were introduced.
>But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit
That's probably fair. Vacation snapshots were at least moderately popular. Kodak didn't get to where it is only servicing pros. Of course, it was at a whole different level than today with smartphones in everyone's pocket and the costs associated with taking a picture effectively zero. We have all become the Japanese :-)
The novelization of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) has a passage that discusses a photograph taken by "a Japanese student in England with a Leica". I doubt future generations will understand the multiple jokes encoded here.
I mean what is there to say? (says the person who writes half a novel every time ;)
I don’t have any emotional attachment to DPReview in particular other than having read some reviews back in the early days, looking at Kodak point and shoots and such.
It still sucks, and Amazon did it in the most inconvenient and callous way possible. There is a huge amount of accumulated knowledge being lost, not just in the reviews themselves but also the forums. And a huge amount has bit-rotted away already, if it hasn’t been archived already it’s gone.
This is a problem all over the web. Web-1.0 forums are dying, and broadcast-style social media like reddit, twitter, or even HN (to a lesser extent) isn’t conductive to replacing it. Nobody is going to run a bunch of lens tests and then post the results in the HN comments section, and once it’s dropped off the front page it’s largely forgotten. At least usenet was archived, but, web 1.0 is largely not, and it's also more difficult to scrape or to handle after scraping.
Discord has replaced it somewhat in the sense of being smaller interest-focused communities but Discord content is not discoverable, and while that’s a benefit sometimes, it’s not a good model for “original research” and documentation. The people putting wikis in their discords are doing it wrong and that’s bad.
Youtube is also an awful medium for analytical data. Today, people would be putting these resolution tests/etc into vlogs or GN/HUB-style reviews and eventually they get deleted by google or copyright claimed/etc, plus they're low-info-density even when they're online. Video is awful, it's just that we've monetized attention and video keeps people's attention for longer.
I supremely enjoy the threaded/non-tree-based and non-gamified model of web-1.0 forums. Like discord I think it builds communities where you know the people and it’s not just about getting maximum updoots, and the threaded model is a lot easier than discussions that go fractally into tangents and smaller points many of which are repeated.
There are still a number of these interest-forums - Photrio (formerly APUG), LargeFormatForums, probably FredMiranda, MFLenses, PentaxForums, and some others. There are also some major interest forums for other hobbies of mine - HomebrewTalk, RCGroups, and others. The interest forums on SomethingAwful are actually a beacon of decorum and civility, despite the site's reputation.
But every year there’s fewer and fewer, and what is undeniable is the consolidation that is being undergone here. From many web-1.0 forums to a few, from web-1.0 forums to centralized platforms like Reddit. It’s inexorable and depressing.
It’s gonna be a dark dark day when MFLenses and LFF and Photo.Net and a few of the other biggies finally turn off the lights. A lot of content lost. The Internet Archive Project are truly doing god’s work here, they are the Foundation holding off the dark ages that google and reddit are bringing on us all. And someday someone may finally get a crack at them and the library will burn. Copyright holders would love to do it.
The only way content is safe is if you can keep it safe yourself. It's ironic that cloud everything has rotted the foundations away from 50 years of decentralized content.
The Hi-matic was not a top-of-the-line pro camera like a Nikon or Hasselblad, but it was not a cheap toy camera. It was a good-quality rangefinder with a decent lens and new features like the auto exposure.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money
just for the record, a cash-cow is a business you can just keep milking cash from, not one that you keep feeding cash to. It comes from the BCG (Boston Consulting Group) "growth-share" matrix to describe the lifecycle of startups.
the basic idea is, a company with a large market share in a growing market will just keep making cash in the future but requires investment now, as opposed to a company with a low market share in a market that's not growing, or the other variations. "Stars" are essentially potential unicorns, worth investing in.
So if I were a contractor, and I was billing ridiculous prices for common items from a government agency that couldn't object due to no bid contracts... basically milking an organization for my own profits... what would you call that government agency?
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.
Hard to say if that’s a good track record or not. Shuttle had 2 fatal missions out of 135, Soyuz had 2 fatal missions out of 147 manned missions. Nothing else is particularly close to those number of manned flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soyuz_missions
Meanwhile, 17 people worldwide have died in on attempted space flights, while 169 people have died on in space flight related accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... (Excluding the original V2 program which had even worse numbers.)
Delta II is from the same era and had only 1 failure that would have killed people aboard out of 155 launches.
Those weren't "manned flights", but if anything Delta and the later SpaceX rockets show that "human rating" isn't adding any safety worth caring about.
Of course you'd want to certify the life support equipment, but that's not why these rockets have failed.
I don't know about Russia, but the US human-rates the "launch" part of the system, e.g. the "stage 1" of the rocket. What I was pointing out is that given the available data it seems odd that we're engaged in that at all.
Especially if we consider SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 should probably have gained automatic human rating based on its record, but the bureaucracy persists.
I think saying the SLS only had one launch failure amounts to creative accounting, STS-107 was also a launch failure, just a delayed one.
If the orbiter had been boosted to orbit by magic it wouldn't have broken apart on reentry, it's only because of how the launch system works that it did so (tiles damaged during launch).
So, getting back to a Delta II (or a successor system), in that case the reentry system would have been a capsule protected by a fairing, and mounted on top of the rocket, and therefore debris falling onto the reentry vehicle during launch wouldn't be a failure mode of the system.
The astronauts on STS-107 could have survived if returned to earth via other means thus it was an issue but not inherently a fatal one. There were really 4 separate failures: the initial damage, failure to assess the damage, failure to have a standby vehicle, actual reentry failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx
As to man rating the Falcon 9, SpaceX CRS-7 is a great example of why you man rate things. The Dragon CRS-7 capsule “could have been recovered if the parachutes had deployed, but the software in the capsule did not include any provisions for parachute deployment in this situation.” You really don’t want that kind of oversight when human lives are at stake.
Anyway the Delta II is reasonably close to the Soyuz but again the rocket itself is only part of the story. You need to look at everything from vibration and g loads to how you get people safely onboard. In the end it was simply cheaper to use the Soyuz and it’s proven systems than independently recreate nearly identical capabilities for minimal gain.
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.
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...
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
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.
> 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.
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,
. . . 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.
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.