NASA Photo Archive
A private art collector in Miami has purchased 8,000 prints of NASA’s space program dating back to the mid 1950s, many of which have never been shown publicly. Valued in the eight figures, the collection includes numerous rare images of the first moon landing, in July 1969, but also many less triumphant but still significant moments in the program’s nearly 65-year history, including the failed Apollo 13 moon landing in 1970 and the tragic explosion of the Challenger in 1986.
Rudolf Budja, an Austrian by birth who moved to the U.S. on his 18th birthday, in 1986, purchased the collection for an undisclosed sum. According to press materials, “comparable” photos to the ones he acquired have sold for between $1,000 and $30,000 each.
On Thursday, Budja unveiled 40 of the prints for public view at the Continuum North Tower in Miami, an exclusive private residence in South Beach. Keith Marks, board president of the condominium, says it’s rare that they open their doors to the public, but consider the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11’s historic moon landing a “more than appropriate” occasion to do so.
NASA Photo Archive
The exhibit, “Space-Time-Continuum,” includes images dating to the inception of NASA in the mid-1950s. In that time, more than 250 robotic spacecraft and 24 humans have ventured into space, some a full decade before Neil Armstrong made his historic “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
NASA’s project began with a series of baby steps toward realizing President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 promise that by the end of the decade, a rocket more than 300 feet tall and constructed, from base to tip, with the technical precision of the finest watch ever made, would carry three men nearly 240,000 miles to that mysterious, cratered sphere in the sky.
In 1958, the unmanned Pioneer 1 launched from Cape Canaveral, becoming the first aircraft ever to enter space; in 1962, John Glenn became the first human to go into orbit, on the Friendship 7; in 1965, the Gemini 4 took astronaut Ed White to perform the first American spacewalk; and in 1968, the Apollo 8 carried the first 3-man crew beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 1970, not even a year after the Apollo 11 mission, an oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 failed before the craft reached the lunar surface. Its crew, with Jim Lovell in command, barely made it back to Earth alive. They survived for the next four days by abandoning the service module and transferring over to the lunar module, in which they orbited the moon before returning to Earth and crashing in the South Pacific. And in 1986, the Challenger exploded a mere 73 seconds into its flight, a horrifying moment made all the more so because it carried a 37-year-old school teacher named Christa McAuliffe.
NASA Photo Archive
The collection includes images from each of those events, as well as many others spanning the years 1955 to 1994, and facsimiles of original NASA documents, mission logos and other ephemera of the space program.
Budja, who worked as a D.J. in Miami, Los Angeles and New York before becoming an art collector, says one of the things that drew him to the NASA collection was the technology. “When you look at the early images, like of Neil Armstrong in his suit, you see how simple it really was,” he says. He won’t say how much he spent for the collection, but he does acknowledge he could make a tidy profit if he were to sell it. As of now, he has no intention of doing so.
Space-Time-Continuum opened at the Continuum North Tower in South Beach October 24th and will be on public display until November 24th.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidalm/2019/10/25/private-collector-buys-8000-original-prints-of-nasas-space-program/
2019-10-25 11:31:03Z
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