Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

exaMINING the ICONIC aND reDISCOVerING the phOtOGraphY Of 335
SpaCe expLOratION IN CONtext tO the hIStOrY Of phOtOGraphY
Saturn Apollo Launch Complex 34, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station: October 1999.
(©Scott Andrews)
captured in black-and-white the discarded isolation of an elevated launch pad
resting on four rectangular legs of steel and eroding concrete. the skeletal launch
pad looms over cracked slabs of concrete like the “shattered visage” from Shelley’s
“Ozymandias.” 88 When andrews’s prosaic image is placed in context to the nostalgic
years of apollo, certain events become more understandable: the early
testing of the Saturn rocket, the death of the frst apollo astronauts (trapped in
fre within their apollo capsule), the subsequent test launches of Saturn and the
frst manned mission of apollo 7, leading to the quest to land on the Moon. What
studied documentation of people and place that might have been photographed
88. percy bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” alexander W. Wilson, et al., The Norton Anthology of
Poetry (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), p. 619.