When we were all astronauts 2025

Pictures from the Cold War

Two things shaped my childhood, and both of them reached me through a television set: the Cold War and the race to the moon. I sat in front of that screen for hours watching the Apollo launches, and on Sunday evenings the news magazine Weltspiegel brought the war in Vietnam into the living room.

These photographs come from that same source — footage on a screen, today found on YouTube. I work at ISO 51,000 or higher and adjust the colors afterwards, so that the grain and the broken color stand for a memory that is still vivid and slowly fading at the same time.

I still remember the details. About nine seconds before launch came the command "ignition sequence start." At five seconds, "ignition." And then, at zero, the voice that mattered most: "We have lift-off." I even remember the beep that sounded whenever the radio channel switched from transmit to receive. When I watch the original broadcasts today, with the original commentary, I still get goosebumps.

But the important thing is what those years installed in all of us: the feeling that anything was possible. It was not true. Apollo 8 flew in December 1968 — the same year as the revolts, the same year tanks rolled into Prague. The worst of the Vietnam war was still ahead of us, and the first oil crisis was five years away.