When we were all astronauts

Pictures from the Cold War · 2025

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

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.

These photographs are made from that same footage — found again today on YouTube, at ISO 51,000 or higher, so that grain and broken color carry a memory that is still vivid and slowly fading at the same time.

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.

The same childhood, the same screen, also gave me The Five Biggest Explosions — where the wonder tips over into something closer to horror.