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Spencer Lowell, photographer
Thomas Payne, photography director
Popular Science, client

“For an article about the first steps NASA is taking to send people to Mars. The Orion spacecraft is the first manned spacecraft NASA has built in decades. At the time, this was the only Orion capsule in existence, and I needed to shoot it for the story. The only way to get access was to agree for Lockheed Martin, which was contracted by NASA to build the capsule, to review all the images. Because I was shooting flight hardware at the Kennedy Space Center, I had no control over anything other than my camera position and the exposure. I backed up as far as I could, centering the capsule and framing it with the giant doors. I got the image. What Lockheed didn’t tell us until after the shoot was that it had to send all the images to its headquarters to review them; I had no choice but to agree. Ultimately, Lockheed kept all my raw files and only sent me medium-res jpegs, which is technically theft, but I wasn’t going to take them to court.”

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