21 glorious, vintage photographs of NASA's glory days

Advertisement

Moon space exploration

Bloomsbury Auctions

Advertisement

Space exploration's golden age was arguably at its very start, when ambition was boundless and progress came in great strides.

A massive collection of vintage photos from this era went up for auction on February 26 at London's Bloomsbury Auction.

The nearly 700 photographs - original prints, not reproductions - come from the collection of a single European collector.

The auction lasted nearly ten hours and brought in a total of £489,440, (or more than $755,500) from more than 300 bidders.

Advertisement

Here are 21 of them, in chronological order, starting in 1946 with the first image of Earth from space.