Earth and the distant moon, photographed by Jim Lovell during Gemini 7 on 8 December 1965. Image: NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders
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Astronaut Jim Lovell died this month, aged 97, one of the last of the original pioneers of space exploration. He missed out on Nasa’s early Mercury missions but was selected for the Gemini programme, and then the Apollo missions which saw space travel go from brief suborbital hops to aiming for the moon in only a few trips.
The monumental scale of these missions has been brought to new light by Cheshire-based digital archaeologist Andy Saunders, who has painstakingly restored film from the missions (using no AI) that had been sitting in a frozen vault for decades.
He tells us how spaceflight’s early milestones compare with the next generation of the space race today.
Big Issue: Is ‘digital archaeologist’ a fair job title?
Andy Saunders: As well as an author, I tend to say I’m an imaging specialist, but yes, digital archaeologist works too! I’m working with material from the very dawn of human spaceflight – film that’s been sitting in cold storage for over half a century. Most of it hasn’t been seen properly since the missions flew and some of the poorer quality images almost certainly have never been seen at all, even back in the day, due to the limitations of analogue processing techniques.
Alan Shepard is strapped into his Freedom 7 capsule, atop a Mercury-Redstone rocket, waiting to make history as the second human, and first American, in space on 5 May 1961. Image: NASA / Andy Saunders
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You could say I’m digging, but digging through noise, grain, poor exposure and degradation to uncover moments of major historical and human significance. So it really can feel like archaeology – like brushing away the dust to reveal this hidden treasure.
Is photograph restoration a way to be a space explorer without having to leave the ground?
Absolutely. I know I could never go because I’m not brave enough and I’m claustrophobic. Working on the imagery is how I get closer to the missions, to the history – the clarity of them makes it feel visceral – probably as close as any of us will ever get to being there ourselves. These astronauts were the first people to leave Earth and we get to look through their eyes. Every frame of film they captured is a direct witness to what they experienced. And many of the images I’ve restored were never clearly seen at the time. So in a way, I’m experiencing and sharing these sights for the first time, decades later. That’s a kind of exploration in itself.
An Agena target vehicle, photographed from Gemini 8. Neil Armstrong completed the world’s first docking in space, 16 March 1966. Image: NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders
Can you outline the stacking process?
It’s quite an unusual process that I use to turn low-quality movie film into a still image, revealing detail that can’t be seen in any single frame. Every image consists of the signal (the bit we want) and noise (the grainy stuff we don’t want). Separating out the individual movie frames, and perfectly aligning and stacking them, essentially strengthens the signal, but it averages out the noise. This improves the quality of the image. It’s incredibly labour-intensive, especially if there’s lots of movement, but it’s a very powerful process and the reward is there. I first applied it to Apollo 11 footage to produce the only clear image of Neil Armstrong on the moon (since he wasn’t captured in the still photographs).
The first selfies in space, one of a series taken by Buzz Aldrin during Gemini 12 on 12 November 1966. Image: NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders
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Does this work reveal the men behind the missions?
Yes – and that’s what gives the book its soul. Mercury and Gemini are often remembered as engineering triumphs, and they were. But they were also intensely human experiences. They were pushing the boundaries of what was possible and the US was racing to catch up with the Soviets, so they took some extraordinary risks. These were people flying in rudimentary capsules on top of unreliable rockets with very little margin for error. And it was all happening in real time – they often had to figure it out as they went along. So the missions are just bursting with human drama. You see tension, exhaustion, focus, awe – and you see their hands on the controls, their eyes through their visors, Earth reflected in their helmets. That raw humanity is what makes these missions so inspiring.
If you were a kid today, would you be less enraptured by a space race driven by billionaires?
It’s certainly different now. Mercury and Gemini were public missions – they belonged to everyone. I think the core dream still holds true though: the idea of escaping Earth and exploring the unknown. It’s just now we seem less tolerant of failure. We’re constantly dished up curated perfection, and we seem to live in a culture that rewards speed, convenience, going viral, taking shortcuts with AI. Mercury and Gemini remind us that true legacy comes from doing hard things that matter, and it can be messy, raw and uncertain. These weren’t perfect people in perfect machines. They were imperfect but brilliant humans doing something wildly new. And that tension – between awe and vulnerability – is what makes their story timeless.
Ed White floats in the void, during the first US spacewalk on Gemini 4. This is the first still photograph of a man in space, taken on 3 June 1965. Image: NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders
They also provided us with our very first views of Earth. The photographs are a reminder that space isn’t just a business opportunity. It can still be about wonder, perspective and pushing the limits of what we can achieve.
Gemini and Mercury Remastered by Andy Saunders is out on 28 August (Penguin, £50).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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