the footagevault story

The footagevault story goes back to the late 1990s.  For nine months during 1997 a team of us had been on the conference circuit, teasing out memories from childhood heroes of the space race - men and woman who’d sent robotic emissaries to the distant worlds at the furthest reaches of our solar system.

We were immersed in the task of creating a definitive eight part series about mankind's exploration of the solar system for the BBC. Nine hundred planetary scientists, engineers and astronauts later we were about to start filming and the mammoth job of condensing the thoughts and discoveries of four decades of space exploration into eight fifty minute films was underway.

To illustrate the interviews we needed to find film of these incredible 20th Century stories and I was dispatched to Los Angeles to delve deep into the vaults of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs.  Like archaeologists excavating an ancient tomb, veteran film archivist John Bluth and I blew dust from the film cans we pulled from the racks.   This collection had lain in various warehouses, largely un-catalogued for decades and at the opening of each can, an aluminium time capsule, neither of us would know what to expect.

John would slowly unwrap the reels of film and gently coax them round the hubs and wheels of the graphite grey Steinbeck projector. To his right the viewing bulb switch would be flicked on with a satisfying clunk, I’d dim the house lights and the trip on our time machine would begin.  Celluloid gems of rocket history flickered onto the tiny screen in front of us, often for the first time since they were shot all those decades before.

It was often like we were there ourselves – standing shoulder to shoulder with these rocket scientists who changed the world.…Von Braun munching sandwiches on the lunch wagon at White Sands rocket testing ground, Viking mission control and biologist Gerry Soffen going wild as mankind touched down softly on Mars for the first time, “thank you Mr President...”, the elation of Voyager scientists Brad Smith and Larry Soderblom as their bold little probe flew past Neptune beaming back stunning vistas of Triton’s geyser smudged terrain four billion miles away.

These golden moments in space exploration filled my mind and dreams for five sacred weeks in a dark room in Pasadena that damp spring.  My love of archive film was born.

I've never quite been able to forget about this archive I unearthed all those years ago and ever since then I've dreamed of building this web site - to bring all those moments of celluloid history to a wider audience.  Since those days on the planets over a decade ago we have widened the collection to include more contemporary missions - such as NASA's current Mars Exploration Rovers, the Cassini mission to Saturn and more recent Space Shuttle flights. And we also now hold high definition (HD) material for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and selected Shuttle missions.

I hope you enjoy browsing the clips here as much as I enjoyed first finding those celluloid moments that matter!