Moonshots: high-resolution aesthetics and the post-digital past

Abstract

As humanity’s fascination with future cosmic voyages grows, the allure of images of outer space taken in the 20th century persists. This article examines how engineers, professionals and users rework old documentation of human and nonhuman endeavors into space. The study considers three cases of digitizing, remastering and algorithmically enhancing NASA-produced photographs and moving images: the digitization of rediscovered Lunar Orbiter satellite images that were transmitted and recorded on magnetic tapes in 1966; the digital modifications and augmentations of astronaut photography showcased in Andy Saunders’ book, Apollo Remastered (2022); and the enhancement of 16mm footage from the Apollo missions by enthusiasts using open-source tools to synthetically generate details and frames never captured on camera. Through a critical analysis of their discourses, the author argues that the idealization of high resolution and ‘seeing in detail’ assumes that historical materials – and perhaps the past itself – must be continuously updated to visually fit our current media standards.

It has been almost 70 years since the Soviet Sputnik satellite first neared a hitherto uncrossable boundary and ushered in what we now refer to as the first ‘Space Age’. After the US shift in policy in 1962 in support of efforts to reach the moon and the ensuing Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, outer space materialized in audiovisual forms for audiences on Earth. Lunar exploration offered a visual testament to our place in the universe with the famous Earthrise, Whole Earth and Blue Marble photographs displaying the planet and the moon suspended in the vastness of outer space. Apollo 11 constituted an experience that David Nye (1996: 246) described as a ‘technological sublime’, foregrounding the spectacle’s ‘irresistible power, magnificence, complexity’. Viewers breathlessly watched the first televised moon landing in 1969 and witnessed, with less enthusiasm, what would amount to the last lunar walk in 1972. The third decade of the 21st century is already seeing a revival in the pursuit of crewed interplanetary exploration. If we are to believe the hype, humanity is at the cusp of radical change.

Given this visual legacy, media representations will undoubtedly shape what lies ahead, especially as NASA and commercial contractors like SpaceX declare their intent to land humans on the moon sooner rather than later. ¹ Reflecting the desire to launch humanity into its extraterrestrial futures, spaceships, intergalactic explorers and exo-planets are frequently portrayed in games, books, television shows, and films. On social media, daily first-person posts from the Mars rover are a common sight, as are fantastic images transmitted by the James Webb telescope. All in all, proclaiming the present era the Second or Third Space Age, as some commentators have done, is by no means a stretch of the imagination. Before the sheer excitement of this moment engulfs us, this article critically engages with outer space depictions, where the new, the old and the remade converge to reveal tacit assumptions about visual culture at present. Simply put, these expectations are intricately woven into the fabric of contemporary technologies, which promise to deliver high-resolution and high-definition encounters with near and distant cosmic bodies. Altogether, the article identifies an epistemic mode I call seeing in detail and reflects on its growing presence in popular culture.

To this end, I examine how and why engineers, professionals and users increasingly – and perhaps surprisingly – turn their gaze to the past and attempt to digitally revitalize space photographs and footage. More than 50 years after NASA’s iconic images were taken, the following contends with the appeal of such images now, as digital media provide new ways to reconfigure the ‘afterlife of astronaut photography’ (Levasseur, 2020: 145). The analysis focuses on the discourse of space enthusiasts who have digitized, remastered and algorithmically enhanced NASA’s documentation of its various missions. The first case concerns the high-resolution digitization of the Lunar Orbiter’s photographs, which were transmitted to Earth and saved on magnetic tapes in 1966. In 2008, a group of NASA engineers digitally recovered these tapes, which contain the highest quality image of Earth first shot from lunar orbit. The second considers Apollo Remastered, a recently published book that displays astronaut photographs modified by restoration expert Andy Saunders (2020). The final section shifts to the amateur sphere on YouTube, where a user enhances footage from the Apollo missions using open-source tools that synthetically generate details and frames never caught on camera.

In considering both professionally produced and algorithmically enhanced content, my aim is to map a wide-ranging set of engagements with visual materials, however divergent. By examining different iterations of working with documentation of landscapes and vistas outside Earth, the research compares practices that shape and authorize our engagements with history through digital means. ² That is, the fascination with 20th-century space imagery persists, yet, as this article argues, under new technological and economic conditions. As a result, images are rendered mutable and continuously revised to fit present-day, not past, aesthetic standards.

Between space photography and the matter of resolution

Photography is a small cog within the vast machine of the US space program and plays several roles: it documents equipment for engineers, it serves as a forensic aid for evaluating technical malfunctions, it records objects and areas of interest for scientific research, and it provides triumphant shots to be disseminated by the agency’s Public Affairs Office. The history of this last function at NASA is at turns tortuous and fortuitous. After Ed White’s spacewalk during Gemini 4 generated 39 spectacular pictures, management was galvanized to incorporate photography into the flight plans of subsequent missions (Levasseur, 2020: 15). Yet, for many engineers and scientists, carrying out such activities meant time spent away from other mission-critical goals, particularly if the resulting visual qualities of an image ‘outweighed its cartographic content’ (Cosgrove, 1994: 276). NASA’s guidelines, therefore, allowed only brief intervals for astronauts to photograph targets of opportunity at their discretion; these would retrospectively prove to be ‘idle’ moments of cultural significance.

To illustrate, although Apollo 8 was equipped with 70mm Hasselblad cameras and an RCA television camera (used to broadcast the first Christmas message from space in 1968), the agency ascribed little importance to Earth as a valuable object for observation. Yet, from deep space, the three astronauts comprehended that it held aesthetic in addition to scientific value and produced what would prove to be one of the most iconic and extensively reproduced images of the 20th century: a bright blue-hued crescent Earth rising over the somber lunar landscape. These radiant, sharp and well-defined worldviews became part of the visual fabric of the period.

However, not all representations were created equal when it comes to image quality. Whereas Apollo 8’s photographs beautifully captured the interplay between our blue planet and its moon, the broadcast delivered only blurry impressions: ‘something that resembled an illuminated sphere called the Earth, it wasn’t high definition by any means’. Musing on human–machine entanglement, the crew of Apollo 8 referred to the camera on board as the ‘fourth astronaut because it was there, it did the job’ (Earthrise: The Story of the Photo that Changed the World, 2018). Regardless of resolution, owing to those additional mechanical astronauts in the succeeding Apollo expeditions, heavenly bodies and the expanse of space were ubiquitously publicized as terrestrial images. And, although visual documentation remained secondary to other data-gathering objectives, by the final expeditions to the Moon, cameras were widely used to map the lunar terrain and satiate popular demand (Levasseur, 2020).

Accounts by key employees at NASA who were involved in various facets of early space photography disclose relatively few clues as to their own views about the epistemological and ontological meanings of this act. ³ More often than not, they characterized photography as a mere task – to be ordered and completed – and their attitude positioned the medium as primarily perceived as part of objective, matter-of-fact scientific production. They thus echo legacies that hark back to the 19th century, when the intersection of telescopic observation beyond the visible horizon and the advent of photochemistry emerged as essential components of scientific discourses that claimed to objectively study the universe (e.g. Blumenberg, 1987; Vogl, 2007). During this period in the scientific community, the camera apparatus, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2010) establish, was deemed to be an unbiased conduit for nature to reveal itself, thereby compensating for the perceived fallacies and prejudices of the human observer.

While modern objectivity is founded on technical acts that Daston and Galison have characterized as ‘seeing clearly’, exemplified in the following is a contemporary epistemic mode that I identify as seeing in detail (p. 120). In such cases, the emphasis is placed not on techniques that produce accuracy by substituting the erring body but on superseding an old medium presumed to interfere with the perfect replication of the world. Accordingly, each of the projects discussed below asserts that its digitization and augmentation of historical documents generates faithful representations of events that took place in faraway spaces when the intervening marks of mediation are eliminated from view in pursuit of an ostensibly immediate encounter with the past.

The professionals and enthusiasts who perform these reworkings aver the verisimilitude of their digital objects on the grounds of their high resolution compared to analog media. This operation is nowhere more apparent than in the use of the diptych, which spotlights ‘high’ versus presumably ‘low’ resolution. Diptychs, such as Figure I, stage the digital output beside its input and mobilize the comparative modality as evidence for a successful transformation. Be it as it may, resolution is much more than the measure of the amount of information captured and represented in a given area; it is inherently relational and contingent. Each period has its own standards of adequacy and preferences for pixel density. Resolution, as an aesthetic dimension, Casetti and Somaini (2018: 88) argue, is ‘a sign of [an object’s] temporal status, of its belonging to a specific phase in the history of digital visual technologies’. Despite the evident value of medium-specificity for historical engagement, the creation of digital renderings suggests that the past – in the context of the cases described below – is best consumed outside its original low resolution form in favor of a more seamless viewing experience. Differently put, imaginaries that invoke a hi-to-lo hierarchy express, to varying degrees, beliefs concerning a teleological progression corresponding to the move away from the material limitations of the analog towards the alleged detail-richness of the digital. To follow Philip Rosen (2001: 302), analog/digital is not a purely technical differentiation, as it is also a matter of ‘sociocultural normativization’ and an ideological distinction between modes of production. Note that the definition of resolution, initially used for analog, has since become predominantly tied to numerical valuations characteristic of digital.

Granted, such comparisons can be somewhat misleading. Beyond a simple binary, judgments concerning what constitutes better or worse quality rely heavily on which format or technology is weighed against another. The difference between a VHS recording of the aforementioned Apollo 8 broadcast and an algorithmically modified HD video of the same event would undeniably be evident to any observer. The inverse also holds. A 16mm film overshadows a pixelated 144p YouTube video of the moon landing. What further complicates any straightforward cross-comparison is that even hi-res images in digital formats such as JPEG may carry considerably less information than, for instance, their 70mm counterparts as they rely on lossy compression techniques to eliminate redundant or ‘surplus’ data undetected by the human eye (Palmer, 2013). For these reasons, the label ‘high’ invoked in the rest of this text does not represent an absolute determination of quality. Instead, it echoes the creators’ descriptions of the superiority of their own visual products.

By and large, terminology such as ‘best resolution’ should also be taken with a grain of salt when considered in relation to marketing strategies. Inventors, manufacturers and companies selling photographic equipment from Henry Fox Talbot through Kodak, Hasselblad outfitting NASA’s astronauts and corporations like Samsung have all too often tied promises to represent the world ‘as it really is’ with a device’s capacity to capture the maximum amount of detail. Similarly, the surveyed digital operations of seeing in detail introduce – perhaps unconsciously – comparable monetary precepts into the domain of history. What logically follows, then, is an imperative to update representations deemed less precise owing to the shortcomings of their old media containers.

Techno-archaeology of the first Earthrise

An unoccupied structure that formerly housed a McDonald’s turned into a vibrant production site in 2008. Several engineers comprising the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project team (LOIRP) set up shop in the building, nicknamed McMoons, at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The group resolved to recover and restore a forgotten set of visuals produced by five lunar orbiters launched in 1966 and 1967 in response to the Soviets’ momentary domination of the space race. The orbiters were the first US satellites that aimed to map the lunar surface in preparation for the arrival of humans on the Moon. On 23 August 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took an image of Earth from orbit. Before Apollo 8 snapped its celebrated image of Earth, a black-and-white photograph, one of 205 frames made by the satellite, became the first publicized Earthrise image. Notably, documenting the planet was only an inconsequential opportunity. Turning the vehicle’s lens towards Earth was not a central part of the flight plan, nor was it considered, in those days, vital to completing NASA’s scientific goals. Instead, the shot was unceremoniously taken as a means of guaranteeing that the photographic apparatus would continuously operate so as to allow as little time as possible for the sticky Bimat film to adhere to itself and compromise the mission (Poole, 2008). By the time the five lunar crafts crashed onto the moon one after the other, the lunar surface had, short of 1 percent, been fully photographically mapped – well before Earth was, with only six shots of the planet captured between the five satellites (Hansen, 1970).

The orbiters produced photographs using two analog 70mm cameras with medium- and high-resolution lenses. The space historian Robert Poole (2008: 72) described this apparatus as ‘an ingenious orbiting photographic laboratory’. Inside the autonomous craft, the roll was processed and dried. The mechanism then electronically scanned the developed images in strips (framelets) and the data were sequentially transmitted down to Earth. The video signals received on the ground were subsequently recorded on 2-inch magnetic tapes. As the video played on screen, the feed was also transferred to a 35mm film developed by Eastman Kodak. The resulting prints were used to scout potential landing sites on the moon and were released to the press, but they had a much lower resolution and about ‘a quarter of the dynamic range’ of the videotapes (Wingo, 2009). Soon after the Orbiter missions were completed, a series of crewed expeditions introduced the world to vibrant pictures of space. The austere, fuzzy quality and streaked aesthetics formed by the splicing of the strips could not compete with the brilliance, smoothness and clarity of their successors, and the Orbiter images – the first of their kind – were soon boxed away in an archive.

Of all the tapes, ‘all but one set were eventually recycled or destroyed’ (Johnson, 2009). LOIRP set their sights on the few that had endured, thanks to the archivist Nancy Evans, who co-founded the Planetary Data System at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). When she came across the Orbiter tapes in the 1970s, Evans asked a fellow worker, ‘what do you usually do with things like that?’ The answer was brief, ‘we usually destroy them.’ This exchange was, presumably, not unlike many others at various NASA locations at the time. Notoriously, the highest quality videotapes containing the 1969 lunar walk were recycled, leaving archives with only relatively low-res copies (Klik, 2021). Yet, unlike the Apollo 11 tapes, the large reels from the Orbiter images were saved, thanks to just one individual in the operations chain who recognized their historical import. Finding no alternatives, Evans resigned herself to storing these forsaken reels containing over 1,500 photographs on her private property. In the 1980s, she added several large, partially damaged Ampex FR-900 tape drives to her collection with the hope that the machines would one day replay the Lunar Orbiter’s achievements. The stacks would silently await visitors for decades. Upon finding out about the collection in an online space forum, a group of current and former NASA employees decided to restore them and to reignite interest in the visual history of the space program.

Poole (2008) hypothesized that, despite being a major ‘first’, the Orbiter’s robotic nonhuman process of photographing outer space produced photographs that elicited little enthusiasm. For instance, on the heels of the release of Earthrise in 1966, the philosopher Martin Heidegger confessed to a sense of alienation evoked by the image (Lazier, 2011). For Poole, the scholarly, and more importantly, the public’s relative disregard for Earthrise and its limited circulation in the popular press owes to its similarity to generic scientific illustrations. It appeared as a visual object lacking emotions or human sensibility: ‘without color, without a human eye behind the camera, without an astronaut to describe the setting, it came over as just a page in an astronomical textbook’ (Poole, 2008: 77). Forty years later, however, the replay of the tapes was experienced in an entirely different manner.

Denis Wingo, the program lead for the project, recounted: ‘I’m seeing these images come down, and I’m seeing it as people saw them 40-something years ago . . . The importance of these images is they are beautiful’ (The Invisible Photograph: Part 3, short documentary, 2014). By ‘people’, he refers not to the audiences of news outlets and print magazines but to the few individuals seated in NASA’s control rooms in 1968 who would have watched the craft’s downlink appear on their screens in high quality (or those who had access to the tapes and not the degraded film). Ultimately, using high-resolution scanning technologies to digitize the video materials elicited an impression of awe quite distinct from Earthrise’s initial viewers – outside a small community of experts. Ultimately, the restoration of the high-quality analog tapes and their hi-res digital scans is used to reverse the loss of detail that took place when analog space photography was publicly transmitted and distributed.

LOIRP’s mission successfully ended in 2017 with the digitization and archiving of over 1,000 files, which are now freely accessible to users and researchers on the agency’s website. The favorable and widespread reporting on the group’s efforts contrasts the media coverage of the original images; interpreted decades apart and through different formats, the same image transforms from a generic visualization to something exceptional, a technological feat of renewal. The earlier aversion to machine vision that Poole (2008) notes is supplanted by widespread habituation to both representations of Earth from outside itself and machinic interventions, ranging from image editing software to the recent wave of image-generation algorithms. As the least interventionist of the three cases examined, the digital scans were subjected to limited manipulation that nevertheless softened the framelet lines, which attest to the Orbiter production apparatus in the image itself.

A widely circulated image of LOIRP’s work in the media is a diptych that juxtaposes the mid-century photograph of Earth with its digital alternative (see Figure 1). ⁴ The chosen comparative modality amplifies the efficacy of the conversion of the publicized photographs (source: 35mm) into large JPEG files (source: 2-inch tapes). By yesterday’s standards, the appearance of Earth and the Moon at the top of Figure 1 represents the pinnacle of 1960s technical achievements and the US’s dominance on the international stage. By today’s standards, the streaked images reproduced in Life Magazine and described in 1966 as ‘clear and rugged’ certainly do not elicit the same sentiment now. Partly occluded by exposure levels, processing procedures and the striation caused by transmission, this view of Earth is inescapably bound by past technologies. The bottom of Figure 1, therefore, not only presents the result of the restoration but also allows us to grasp something of the here and now, counterintuitively, because the technical artifice, unlike that of its source material, is less apparent to the eye accustomed to digital technologies. The comparative, therefore, enshrines the disparity between the two media forms.

Figure 1.

Comparison of Earthrise captured in 1966 and LOIRP’s digital scan of the recovered image on tape. Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project.

History, for LOIRP, is inextricably linked with the development of technique. As the high-resolution framelets slowly appeared on the refurbished devices in the McMoons workspace, the team reported that it ‘felt like looking into the past’, but not just any past (Johnson, 2009). The engineers, who often refer to themselves as ‘techno-archaeologists’, allude to a particular imaginary of unrecoverable loss:

We are literally digging up our technical past to restore it. It is said that only 1% of the literary works of the Greek and Roman civilizations have made it to us today. I would estimate that out of that 1%, only 1% of the engineering and science works have made it to us today. The Greeks were masterful mechanical engineers, and the Romans were unsurpassed Civil Engineers. Just think if we had not lost that legacy. This is what our project is all about, preserving the technical legacy of the American technical civilization. (Jardin, 2013)

And, similarly, in the short documentary The Invisible Photograph: Part 3, Keith Cowing, the team’s co-leader, offhandedly remarked, ‘It’s like having an entire wing of the library of Alexandria suddenly dropped in your lap, and you just have to figure out the card catalog.’

These invocations of Classical Antiquity are telling. They link the techno-archaeology performed in the lab with a generalized past through inherited notions about how Western knowledge is produced, organized and preserved. Notably, state-of-the-art technology is positioned as another salve for the unfulfilled promises of stability and durability. Techno-archaeology is but one approach to ‘futureproofing’ the images of the Orbiter; the project involves both archival preservation (safekeeping source materials as completely and for as long as possible) with digital reformatting (ensuring access through file migration, see Lischer-Katz, 2022). Excavating remnants will no longer suffice; knowledge is to be extricated from its own time, restored and made available online in hi-res JPEG. Though this concerns an open-access governmental project rather than a profitable venture, such acts of decoupling medium from content suggest a latent supposition. For the past to appeal to viewers today, it, too, must keep up with the times and match the expectations of online users conditioned into engaging with visual materials through the lenses of the best, highest and latest. Under such conditions, grainy and blurry media objects are left to the care of archives while stunningly detailed renderings are circulated to the public.

Experiencing space anew through the eye, not the lens

Released in 2022, the photo book Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record features work by restoration expert Andy Saunders. The inside sleeve touts the coffee-table-sized book as nothing short of ‘the definitive photographic record . . . a high-definition journey into the depths of space’. The superlative ‘highest’, often used in marketing speak, recurs throughout this aesthetic journey and demarcates its commercial exclusivity: ‘The aim is to sympathetically remaster and restore these important images and present them in the highest clarity possible’ (pp. 435–436, emphasis added).

Saunders’ book progresses chronologically, with each section exhibiting modified photographs of a certain mission prefaced by an inventory of its imaging equipment. In contrast to the outcast tapes digitized at McMoons, this project draws on source materials that were preserved in their original form since they were produced as part of crewed missions and safely returned to Earth (rather than broadcast). After the rolls and reels had been decontaminated from the dreaded space dust and processed, the negatives and masters were placed in cold storage, insulated from the world and its harmful elements at the Johnson Space Center. Work on the book began after NASA had already retrieved the flight footage from its vaults and proceeded to thaw and scan the sources in high resolution in 2008. Saunders further edited and enhanced the digitized images using digital software for Apollo Remastered. He chose not to use AI and relied on his professional restoration skills to complete the work, producing images that are rich, heavy and full of details that were otherwise obscured.

He removes dust, reverses overexposure and masks marks from handling and processing. Overall, the book aims to reduce the distance between then and now by overriding what allows historical memory to exist and persist in material form, i.e. the specific traces of the life of photography and film – affordances and obstacles included. Saunders’ technical execution is particularly impressive in a small diptych that contrasts an underexposed image of an astronaut’s profile with a reworking of it, the result of which appears on the book’s cover. The original image in question, almost entirely black, reveals only hints of a window, no human figure. In altered form, it brilliantly delivers an iconic scene of longing for something beyond ourselves as the astronaut stares into infinity. The comparative modality works to convince readers that the past is optimally perceived and experienced as such if it submits to erasing signs of its own time and vicissitudes. In order to ‘see as they saw it’, for Saunders, the images had to outgrow their immediate containers (making reviews of the book that liken it to a time capsule all the more interesting; see Glester, 2023).

This approach is admittedly not entirely uniform across the project. Some remnants are purposefully allowed to remain. For one, the crosshair signs are not removed because, as ‘a documentary measuring tool of the utmost precision’, they underscore the images’ scientific status (Saunders, 2022: 1). Although dirt and other elements deemed distracting are digitally smoothed away, artifacts produced by the camera apparatus, such as marks of the photographic plate, appear in the enhanced versions so long as these traces do not draw attention away from the content of the image, he explains. Saunders, therefore, differentiates between seemingly essential and accidental visual properties with the aim of balancing history with novelty, a distinction that, to follow Peter Geimer (2018), fails to acknowledge that accidentality is at the core of the photographic act.

All things considered, the process is rooted in subjective and embodied, not objective, experience. Although Saunders (2022) invokes the term ‘crystal clear’, which alludes to the aforementioned modern notion of photographic objectivity, in Apollo Remastered, the main obstacle is not the human observer but analog’s purported inability to provide unadulterated representations of scenes that only a handful of people had previously observed. Saunders proclaims his intentions ‘to produce the most accurate representation of what the astronauts actually witnessed’ (pp. 435–436). As part of his effort to reveal what the eyes perceived (but what the original images could not reliably replicate), he interviewed astronauts about their recollections of their journeys into space decades ago, and they consulted on and evaluated the authenticity of his restoration work. It is no coincidence that the text references Richard Underwood, the agency’s foremost photographer who trained and mentored the astronauts before and during flights, for whom the camera’s job is to accurately mediate the sights apprehended by the body. ‘We wanted pictures that recorded it the way the astronauts saw it, and this camera with this lens is exactly the way the human eye works’ (Underwood, 2000). Restoration, for Saunders, offers a chance at this sought-after proximity by way of removing the technical remainder; the images should appear sans the original camera and its discontents. In such a way, high resolution becomes tethered to perceptual experiences, ostensibly untarnished by the medium that first apprehended these exceptional scenes. As such, the project renders contemporary medium-specificity invisible.

Saunders’ accompanying text evinces conflicting views about the extent to which technology is instrumental or incidental to apprehension, certainly given his extensive attention to listing the photographic devices involved in each mission. He asserts that the resulting experience would be ‘as close as we can get to standing on the Moon ourselves’, which means that the general audience could ‘better comprehend what it would be like to witness the events first-hand’ (p. 2). Favoring the ‘first-hand’ surely elides the second-hand, the technical intermediary. And indeed, he describes his desire to provide an avenue for readers to ‘try to gain an understanding of the endeavor and imagine making the incredible journey ourselves’ and composes sentences that consecutively utilize the verbs ‘to view’, ‘to peer’, ‘to glimpse’, ‘to make fresh’, ‘to marvel’, ‘or, simply observe’. But, in the next sentence, his language suddenly slips away from the biological as he acknowledges the presence of the apparatus in the mediation of space: ‘to peer through the lens of their cameras’ (p. 2).

Given Saunders’ frequent invocation of sight and human organs, it is worth noting that the astronauts’ actual eyes played a somewhat lesser role in the actual process of documentation. Extra-vehicular photographic activity relied on the fact that cameras were mounted on their suits and, even though some devices were handheld, NASA’s engineers had removed the viewfinder. Design-wise, the cameras did not fit with the bulky spacesuit, its view-obstructing helmet and thick gloves. Underwood (2000) trained the astronauts ‘to shoot from the hip, like Gunsmoke, draw and shoot, get your target.’ Put another way, the eye was always imaginary.

This fact makes the frequent references to human vision as surprising as they are indicative. Apollo Remastered naturalizes photography as a mere proxy for the eye and, in the process, revels in an idealized digital media object that is cleared of signs that expose it to be a temporally contingent artifice. But let us not forget that cutting-edge aesthetics are particularly fleeting; they are bound to become a muddled testament of bygone eras, considering that hi-res standards obsolesce as soon as a new product is released to the market. The goal of seeing space just as the astronauts did might then be an unattainable dream caught in an endless cycle of upscaling ad nauseam.

YouTube generation: 16mm goes 4K

The past three years have seen an incredible surge in algorithmic image-generation techniques as new proprietary and open-source products are released at dazzling speeds. It is entirely plausible that the internet’s taste for enhanced videos of humanity’s forays into the cosmos relates to the rather mundane issue of copyright infringement and its enforcement on a video-hosting platform, YouTube. With the exception of information relating to national security matters, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 directs the agency to make its activities and findings available for the benefit of other agencies, scientists and taxpayers. The regulation may explain why early experimentation with generative AI tools popularized around 2020 has tended to alter renowned and neglected silent films and space footage, both of which are all but completely in the public domain. Nevertheless, the appeal to synthetic outputs to re-render space exploration mirrors the revival of the technological sublime of space travel, where both spectacles of breakthrough innovations become ends in their own right.

By amassing a considerable amount of training data, these AI tools can perform various actions: generate images from textual queries, transform images befitting specific genres or styles, increase resolution and compensate for degraded or missing information in low-res pictures and videos. In technical terms, the myriad upscaled videos that YouTube introduces to its users differ from Apollo Remastered and the Orbiter digitization in how they are generated. When video footage from the 1960s and 1970s is fed into different neural networks, the input undergoes various processes that cast the idea of increased definition in a new light since it includes data not originally captured on film. Although neural networks predict details by comparing adjacent frames, they do not reveal them (which means that the operation is distinct from stacking multiple frames of the same object as Saunders did or the restoration performed by LOIRP’s engineers). Algorithmic guesswork is born out of multiplicity, one that is not exclusively trained on footage of the interstellar kind.

One AI-powered upscale of Apollo 16’s rover adventures that gained almost 3 million views on YouTube boasts a resolution of 4K and a frame rate boost of 60fps (Shiryaev, 2020). Beyond the clear quality of the image and the addition of a soundtrack, this version’s most conspicuous visual feature is the fluid motion of objects. The original footage of the extravehicular action, shot with a handheld 16mm Maurer camera, had undergone multiple conversions and interventions before it appeared on the platform. To appreciate the extent of the technical transformation, the maker of the upscale links to its source material, another video of the event in HD with motion stabilization already applied to smooth out astronaut Charles Duke’s justifiably shaky camerawork. The possible permutations this source has undergone as it has moved from NASA’s possession to the platform are nowhere specified, meaning that the intensity and nature of the digital processes involved may ultimately remain unknown. Notably, the video presents a different sort of comparative modality that contrasts digital with digital.

The last 10 seconds of the upscale reveal the enhanced result and its ‘original’ YouTube predecessor side by side, which allows users to fully appreciate the differences between the versions. This moving-image diptych distills the comparison to one variable: the aptitude of current techniques to amplify when applied to what only appear to be untampered ‘raw’ historical materials. The visual feature of the split screen effectively directs the viewer’s gaze to move back and forth, allowing scrutiny of the images’ quality and of the added information by underscoring the off-platform migration from the original 16mm to MP4 and the on-platform improvement to 4K. The use of the split screen levels the playing field for trained and untrained viewers. The experience of digital enhancement is bifurcated: one eye on the present vision of emerging tech and another on the past as we know it through the assumed qualities of old media. As history unsticks from its varying receptacles, the algorithm expediates unceasing reformatting through speculation. While media theory identified the photographic grain as a material testament to presence and authenticity, this case goes so far as to reject even the digital equivalent of the grain, the pixel, in favor of an abundance of detail (Barthes, 2010).

As with the previous cases, the hi-res language clues us in on what vision and visuality are assumed to be. This enhancement is not a preservation project in the traditional sense but one in which history-making and consumption increasingly mirror our current modes of engagement with technology. One of many user comments expresses this orientation:

All I saw previously was a pixelated retro video, which i also had uploaded to one of my Docu channels. but your video is just on another level, this is stunning work and amazing piece of history on so many levels.

Though evidently not a professional, the user appears to be invested in engaging with history in the general (rather than disciplinary) sense, noting their participation in disseminating these videos along with many other individuals on the platform. The user’s fascination with ‘pieces of history’ is bound to their appearance and the degrees to which their artifice (i.e. the pixel) is visible. The more details an image contains, the less its pixel structure is discernable, thereby veiling its constructed and contingent nature. Even more so, their comment crystallizes that the drive to upgrade and update, prompted by big tech, becomes imbricated in various spheres of cultural and knowledge production, including history – however loosely defined.

In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Chun (2016) theorizes the rhythm of digital culture as one of the continuously imposed practices that create dependency on the newest and latest. Putting the spotlight on ‘upgrade culture’, Adam Richard Rottinghaus (2021) likewise traces a shift that has taken place in the past several decades away from intermittent technological innovation to perpetual change, such that it becomes a banal and commonplace aspect of social life: ‘upgrade culture is repetition and recurrence masquerading as technological progress’ (p. 14). Updates and upgrades amount to an urgent, if not entirely conscious, need to enhance.

That upscaling practices will gain even more traction in the coming months and years is highly probable, if not all but inevitable. The neoliberal mandate of innovation and limitless growth in the domain of image production increasingly challenges and intermingles notions of fidelity and high resolution with generative techniques. Operating outside the realm of scientific discourse, this AI experiment lays bare its commercially driven logic in ways that are far less obvious in the previous two cases, despite the fact that updating is just as deeply embedded in their attempts to optimally engage with historical materials. Ultimately, there is little room for ‘degraded’ aesthetics and what outdated media could teach audiences about the past and its modulations.

Conclusion: the specs of history and the hi-res compulsion

Pixel by pixel, detail by detail, and frame by frame, the past is continuously reconfigured and remediated. As we enter another Space Age, techno-archaeologists aim to recover the highest-resolution magnetic tapes and make them available online to preserve US technical achievements. The photographer works to create a high-resolution ideal of the past that is unencumbered by the constraints of its analog receptacles. The online producer experiments with emerging ways of crafting historical events in ways that approximate information that has not been captured on the lunar surface and compensate for data lost in ongoing migration efforts. From the least to the most interventionist, beginning with digitization, then remastering and, finally, algorithmic enhancement, the three projects pry open the link between content and medium to varying degrees.

It is worthwhile considering how these projects align with common paradigms for treating historical materials. Broadly construed, the restorationist approach views the past as an intelligible object of scientific study, utilizing tools and techniques to restore objects to their presumed original state; the other approach, preservation, refrains from erasing the marks of time left on an object throughout its lifetime, while still striving to ensure its longevity. That being said, Philip Rosen (2001) argues that, in practice, even this distinction between the two quickly blurs in a medley of real and replicated elements. Even more so, the projects considered here resist such categorization as they remain tethered to the referentiality of the event, if not to its initial form, which can undergo manipulations, transformations and re-combinations. As high resolution becomes synonymous with near-complete comprehension of something beyond one’s immediate grasp, it takes the place of objectivity as an epistemological anchor. The relative stability of analog photography, which allowed objects to indexically attest to their own time, is exchanged for the durability of history through updating. This zeitgeist traverses the professional and amateur spheres.

Several years before the launch of the Apollo missions, the philosopher Hannah Arendt had already forewarned that, in its pursuit of the techno-scientific ‘Archimedean point’, the ‘invasion of the space of the universe’ would inevitably lead to the denigration of human sense perception (Arendt, 1963: 538). This article aimed to show how sight has not been cast out of the processes but has been reconfigured (and metabolized) into a particular regime of seeing in detail. The visual rhetoric of technological domestication is epitomized by the comparative modality, which serves to underscore the differences between past and present techniques (i.e. high-resolution capabilities as extraordinary and conspicuous) and to naturalize the ‘new’ into contemporaneous ways of seeing (i.e. to render it transparent).

Against the abandoned, the blurry, the over- and underexposed, the out-of-focus and the fading, digital media is purported to offer a remedy. But what is the significance of fetishizing what is said to provide an experience of seeing things past with stunning clarity? And why does it become a standard to strive for? Together, each project demonstrates a genuine care for and interest in the perpetuation of space history – quite admirable given the diminishment of institutional resources for preservation and maintenance. At the same time, upgrading practices also operate in a capitalist world that favors fast-paced disposability of devices and compatible formats. Quite the opposite of nostalgia and the valorization of space age mid-century modern aesthetics, the product promoted here is our present and its future promises.

In a sea of upgrades, post-digital history becomes nearly agnostic to medium and format. From now on, further alterations and technical modifications will always be on the horizon. This accelerating rhythm constitutes a critical juncture precipitated by the emergence of new digital approximation techniques that highlight the fraught relation between representations and objects. Consider the electronics powerhouse Samsung, which recently made headlines when it released a feature branded as ‘space zoom’ that allows the cameras on its mobile phones to create sharp images of exceptionally distant entities. Not long after the feature debuted, users and tech reporters revealed that the incredible shots result from a process of ‘detail enhancing’ and reducing ‘blurs and noises’ triggered when the software automatically recognizes a spherical shape resembling the Moon (Vincent and Porter, 2023; Wong, 2021). The company faced a backlash for failing to transparently address the scope of the alleged manipulation. Similar stories of stealthy improvements performed by other companies, like Huawei’s ‘moon mode’, periodically enter public discourse and, like the three digitization projects, elicit reactions that spotlight the uneasy relation between digital malleability and high-resolution compulsion. This is all to say that the comparative modality of the diptych may soon either disappear or simply reflect the minuscule change between one upgrade and the next. Will this visual modality continue to be relevant in the future? And, if so, which of the versions of the past will be staged against another?

A final space anecdote. On board Apollo 12 was a television camera that was set up to broadcast the second human exploration of the moon’s ‘magnificent desolation’ in color. As the astronauts readied to broadcast the lunar walk, Alan L Bean unintentionally sabotaged the mission’s visual recording when, in haste, he pointed the lens at the Sun. Frantic efforts by television networks to find alternatives for the lost transmission ensued. Among the various strategies implemented to allay the sudden loss of connection on air, NBC stood out in its choice of medium. Instead of the terminated live feed from the Moon, the studio cut to realistic astronaut puppets that it had previously used to report the Gemini missions (Scott and Jurek, 2014). Then, as now, the ambition to reach the farthest corners of the universe was accompanied by the desire to technologically reproduce such sights, to mirror the unknowns of outer space in the utmost vividness and fullness, and in the most immersive of ways. When the realities of flying too close to the Sun overcame the technical extensions of Apollo 12, approximation techniques, however fabricated, offered a workaround. As synthetic media becomes the new norm, we must be attentive to its potential, in this case, to draw audiences to engage with topics such as history. Yet, to avoid falling for the spectacle to the point of oblivion, it is vital to also critically address AI-produced imagery as part of a larger economic enterprise that aspires to expand in various directions, from Earth to the cosmos and from the present to the past and future.