A pair of photographs, one showing Walter Schirra being briefed on the first Hasselblad to be ed to photograph from space (20 February 1962) and the second one showing Gordon Cooper demonstrating his 16mm camera to his Mercury Atlas 9 back-up pilot Alan Shepard. The Hasselblad was modified by Roland Red William, shown in the first photograph.Two vintage gelatin silver prints on fibre-based paper, 25.3 x 20.5 cm (10 x 8 in), [NASA 63-MA9-54 and LOC 62C-1479], NASA AF captions on versosFootnotes:Wally Schirra was the first one astronaut to carry a Hasselblad camera into space. He had owned a Hasselblad 500C before his first flight , ing it to photograph, for example, race cars at Indianapolis. Nevertheless, there had been considerable resistance to astronaut photography in general and to Hasselblad in particular becae it was heavy and large, its materialponents were unresearched, and it required considerable modifications to meet NASA's flight qualifications. (...)I talked to Ralph Morse and Carl Mydans [of Life] and to Ken Weaver, Otis Imboden, and Luis Marden of National Geographic about what camera they would rmend. They all said, Hasselblad, but for... -but for this, but for that. The but-fors were the discrepancies in the design - gear train problems, jamming, not a good fit, and this kind of thing. So on my first flight we and off-the-shelf Hasselblad and had all the but-fors taken out. (The View from Space, R. Schick, J. von Haaften)In the end, astronauts' insistence won over NASA's superiors and modified Hasselblad produced in the hands of consecutive Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts the most stunning space photography.