21 glorious, vintage photographs of NASA's glory days

Bloomsbury Auctions

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.

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