LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge (1938 – 2013) was best-known for his coverage of the signature events of the 1960s, and especially the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Eppridge was right there snapping pictures when Sirhan Sirhan gunned down RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.
Months after RFK’s murder, in late 1968, Eppridge took an assignment that was far removed from the madness of the age. He and writer Donald Jackson spent two months chronicling the wild mustangs that still roamed the mountains, canyons and plains of Nevada, eastern Wyoming, and Montana.
“Spending months out there in those vast spaces, photographing mustangs and the people who live and work there, among the horses—that saved me,” Eppridge told LIFE.com, a few months before his death in October 2013. “Bobby Kennedy’s death shook me to the core. Getting out there with [writer] Jackson, traveling that old landscape in a four-wheel-drive pickup truck, helped to heal me, in a way, and got me back into the world.”
By the summer of 1942, the conflagration sparked by Germany’s swift and brutal aggression against its neighbors and by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had spread far and wide enough that the conflict could legitimately be seen as a second “world war.”
As in all wars, propaganda played a central role in the mission and the strategies of the combatants. However, where the Axis had legendarily shrill and, at times, unhinged characters like Joseph Goebbels in charge of their “messaging,” the far-more-fortunate Allies could and did call on the greatest propagandists of all time: Hollywood filmmakers. Acknowledged movie masters like Frank Capra, John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Huston and others made documentaries and films that exhorted “the free people of the world.”
But perhaps no filmmaker provided richer fare for the Allies during the war itself than Alfred (later Sir Alfred) Hitchcock. Between 1940 and 1945, Hitch made films for England’s Ministry of Information as well as several excellent movies featuring plots that centered on the war (Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent, the remarkable Lifeboat and others). Hitchcock’s most unusual director’s credit from the 1940s, however, wasn’t attached to a movie at all, but instead appeared in the July 13, 1942, issue of LIFE magazine. Titled Have You Heard? (The Story of Wartime Rumors), the feature carrying Hitchcock’s name is a war thriller in photos, shot by LIFE’s Eliot Elisofon from a plot “suggested by” FDR’s press secretary, Stephen Early, and “directed by” Hitchcock himself.
As LIFE told its readers in the introduction to the piece:
From Stephen Early, [White House press] secretary to President Roosevelt, recently came the suggestions that LIFE tell a picture story of wartime rumors and the damage they are liable to do. In accordance with this request, the editors asked Alfred Hitchcock, famed Hollywood movie director, to produce such a story, with LIFE photographer Eliot Elisofon as his cameraman. When Mr. Hitchcock graciously agreed, a script was prepared, the director picked his characters from the ranks of movie professionals and LIFE’s Los Angeles staff, and shooting commenced in Hollywood.
‘Have You Heard?’ is the result of their cooperation in photo-dramatization. A simply sexless story, it shows how patriotic but talkative Americans pass along information, true or false, until finally deadly damage is done to their country’s war effort. One false rumor is silenced by a man who later is unwittingly responsible for starting a true rumor which ends in a great catastrophe. Moral: Keep your mouth shut.
What’s especially wonderful about Have You Heard?, meanwhile, is that parts of it really do feel like Hitchcock. Several of Elisofon’s photos might be mistaken for stills from a film by the Master of Suspense, and Hitchcock himself even makes one of his trademark and refreshingly comical appearances as a tertiary character in the narrative. (See slide #14 in the gallery above.)
It might not rise to the heights the director scaled in masterpieces like The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, North by Northwest and Vertigo, but as a record of Hitchcock’s willingness to lend his craft in the service of the war effort, Have You Heard? remains a fascinating, and still-entertaining, little gem.
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “A church congregation in the city of Zenith hears its minister offer a special prayer for ‘our boys in the armed services who even now may be sailing for such far places as Alaska.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “Busing home from Sunday services, the blonde girl in the funny hat tells her friend: ‘I’m sure now, those Zenith soldiers are sailing from Alaska. He didn’t ask us to pray last Sunday, so they must be leaving this week.’ In bus seat behind them, a musician leans forward to overhear their conversation.” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “At Zenith’s Steam Palace, the bus-riding violinist confides to a local hardware salesman: ‘Have you heard? Troopships are sailing to Alaska this week. They say thousands of boys are going up there. Preachers are already praying for them around the city.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “At a Zenith restaurant that Sunday evening the hardware salesman entertains some friends. ‘Have you heard?’ he asks. ‘No? Well, we are sending thousands of boys up to Alaska. Their troopship sails on Wednesday or Thursday, I understand, and they’ll be convoyed by six destroyers on their trip up there.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “One of the dinner guests, a gas-station proprietor with a liking for bow ties, chats with his customers next morning: ‘Have you heard about the large convoy of troop ships going to Alaska? Friend of mine who really knows says they’re leaving Wednesday night.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “At the dentist’s, pretty dinner companion of the hardware salesman passes on the secret news. ‘They’re sailing Thursday afternoon. It means a new front. The man who told me knows one of the officers.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “‘There’s going to be a blackout so that no one will know when the troopships go out Friday midnight for Alaska,’ confides another young woman, who was at the salesman’s dinner, to her roommate.” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “‘I never listen to rumors,’ replies a Zenith haberdasher to customer who repeats troopship story. ‘You shouldn’t spread such talk. Nothing but rumors!'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “A dozen tropical shirts are ordered by a young Army lieutenant in the store of the Zenith haberdasher the next evening just before closing time. But the sleeves are too long and will have to be altered. The lieutenant says: ‘If you can’t get them done and delivered to my hotel by 9 o’clock Friday night, never mind the order. I won’t be able to pay for them if I’ve gone when they’re delivered. Understand?’ The haberdasher says he understands. But he muses to himself: ‘Tropical shirts. This young fellow must be headed to Australia.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “An hour late for dinner, the haberdasher arrives home to find his wife and children already finishing their meal. He explains his tardiness: ‘Last customer held me up at the store. A lieutenant. He took a dozen tropical shirts. He had to have the sleeves altered. I guess he’s been ordered to Australia. I’ve got to get his order done by 9 o’clock Friday night. I suppose he’s sailing on a troopship Friday midnight and that’s why he’s in such a rush.’ The haberdasher’s son Christopher, a little pitcher with big ears, takes in every word.” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “Playing with ‘the gang’ down the block the next afternoon, Christopher seeks to impress his older friends: ‘Gee, my dad’s making shirts for almost the whole Army. He sold lots to soldiers going to Australia to fight. He’s working now so the troopships can sail Friday midnight.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “Bursting with excitement, Christopher’s older pal arrives home to find his mother’s afternoon bridge club in session. ‘You know what, Mom? Christopher’s father’s making shirts for a whole boatload of soldiers. He says they’re all sailing for Australia at midnight next Friday.'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “Next morning, the plumpish member of the bridge club makes her regular weekly visit to one of Zenith’s beauty parlors. An ardent gossip, she can hardly wait to get out of the drier and tell her friend and the manicurist the ‘news’ she heard the day before. ‘My dear, have you heard about the troopships sailing for Australia? Yes, my dear, they’re going out at midnight Friday — lots of them. I’ll bet General MacArthur’ll be glad to hear about this. Don’t you think it would be thrilling to go down to the docks Friday night and watch them leave!'” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “At the Friendship Cafe the manicurist tells her boyfriend: ‘A customer told me today that lots of our troopships are sailing to Australia on Friday at midnight.’ The shady-looking man standing next to them listens attentively. (Note bartender played by Alfred Hitchcock, center).” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “The mysterious man, whose ears were even more attentive than the manicurist’s boyfriend, leaves the cafe, remembering these important words: ‘Troopships … Australia … Friday at midnight.’ His business is to check all rumors, not pass them along for social conversation.” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: “A midnight rendezvous is held by a mysterious man, an Axis agent, with a U-boat officer and seaman who have paddled ashore in a small rubber boat. In the dark cove, the secret military information the haberdasher so innocently revealed to his family at last reaches the enemy.” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Alfred Hitchcock picture story in LIFE
Caption from LIFE: ‘How does the enemy find out about these ships?’ exclaims the irate Zenith haberdasher, who habitually rejects all rumors, as the morning paper tells him what happened to the troopship aboard which was the young lieutenant who bought the dozen tropical shirts.” (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
We do not usually give so much space to the work of men we admire so little. So began a remarkable editor’s note to LIFE’s readers in an April 1970 issue of the magazine, introducing a photographer named Hugo Jaeger a man who, LIFE pointed out, “was a fascist before the Nazi party was formed.”
In that issue, LIFE published a series of startling color pictures that Jaeger made in the late 1930s and 1940s, when he enjoyed unprecedented access to the Third Reich’s upper echelon, traveling with and chronicling Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts at massive rallies, military parades and, frequently, in quieter, private moments. Jaeger’s photos were, it turned out, so attuned to the Führer’s vision of what a so-called Thousand Year Reich might look and feel like that Hitler reportedly declared, upon first seeing the kind of work Jaeger was doing: “The future belongs to color photography.”
The story of how LIFE came to own Jaeger’s collection of roughly 2,000 color photographs—an archive comprising a vast, insider’s portrait of the Reich—is an extraordinary and little-known tale of intrigue from the post-war years.
According to Jaeger’s own account of the creation, preservation and, ultimately, the sale of his photos, the espionage-thriller aspect of the tale began in 1945, when he found himself face to face with half a dozen American soldiers in a small town west of Munich, as Allied troops were making their final push across Germany at war’s end. This very scenario had, for years, been Jaeger’s enduring nightmare: he knew, after all, that he would be arrested or worse if the conquering Americans discovered his trove of pictures and his close, personal connection to Hitler.
On that spring day in 1945, during a search of the house where Jaeger was staying, the Americans found the leather satchel in which the Führer’s personal photographer had hidden literally thousands of color slides. What happened next, however, left Jaeger staggering.
Inside the satchel that held the compromising pictures, Jaeger had also placed a bottle of brandy and a small, ivory gambling toy a spinning top for an old-fashioned game of chance known by, among other names, “put-and-take.” Happy with their find, the soldiers sat down to a session of put-and-take while sharing the bottle of brandy with Jaeger and the owner of the house where the photographer had been living. (Jaeger’s own apartment in Munich had been destroyed in Allied air raids.) The leather satchel, and whatever else was hidden away in it, was forgotten as the brandy dwindled and the game of put-and-take spun on.
After the Americans left, a shaken Jaeger packed the color slides into metal jars and, over time, buried them in various locations on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his caches, digging them up, drying them out, repacking and reburying them. He had hidden them systematically over an area of a square mile or so, with notes and a map to guide him back: “From the railroad switch, 263 ties west, then 15 meters north. . . .”
Jaeger finally retrieved the collection for good in the late 1950s all 2,000 of the slides, amazingly, were still in good shape and in 1965, after storing them in a Swiss bank for years, he sold the entire archive to Time Inc.
Here, in grudging acknowledgment of the scope of Jaeger’s achievements as a photographer—acknowledgment, in other words, of the work of a man we admire so little—LIFE.com presents a series of color pictures from the over-the-top celebrations in Berlin marking Hitler’s 50th birthday (April 20, 1939), as well as some of the ludicrously gaudy gifts bestowed on the German leader by his Nazi peers and sycophants.
Seen today, Jaeger’s photographs elicit an unsettling sense of both dismay and dread: dismay at the sheer scale of the tribal, nationalist madness that, not so long ago, convulsed a “civilized” nation of millions; and dread at the horrors that, we know, such madness would soon unleash.
The automobile engineer Ferdinand Porsche (in suit), Adolf Hitler and, immediately to Hitler’s left, the head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, admired Hitler’s birthday gift on his 50th birthday: a convertible Volkswagen.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A rally in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A rally in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Ost-West-Achse (East-West Axis) in Berlin, site of a massive rally and parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
German troops goose-stepped past the reviewing stand during a massive rally and military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthdayBerlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Guests of honor at a rally and military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Heavy artillery passed the reviewing stand during a military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A rally and military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Banners hung from buildings in honor of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Adolf Hitler shook hands with one of his personal photographers, Heinrich Hoffmann, while his doctor, Theodor Morrell (right) waited to greet the Fuhrer on Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939, in Berlin.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Some of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday gifts stored in a room at the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, April 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The automobile engineer and designer Ferdinand Porsche (in suit) presented Hitler with a convertible Volkswagen for Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, Germany, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Some of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday gifts, including flower vases emblazoned with swastikas, were stored in a room at the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, April 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Adolf Hitler received a model of a Condor airplane as a gift on his 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939. Beside Hitler (left) stood Capt. Hans Bauer, his personal pilot.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A solid gold model of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (a celebrated German museum), a gift from Luftwaffe commander—and future suicide at the Nuremberg war crimes trials—Hermann Goering to Adolf Hitler on Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The automobile engineer and designer Ferdinand Porsche (in suit) presented Adolf Hitler with a model car during celebrations for Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A hand-worked castle inlaid with precious stones given to Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.
Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Berlin’s Brandenburg gate and colonnades were lit up at night in honor of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.
In February 1945, LIFE magazine declared Mont-Tremblant, a resort in the Laurentian Mountains 90 miles north of Montreal, the “ski-fashion center of the world.” The reasons for Mont Tremblant’s surpassing winter-style meccas like St. Moritz and Sun Valley, according to LIFE, were two: “Many of the guests are rich, well-dressed friends of the owner, Joseph B. Ryan, grandson of financier Thomas Fortune Ryan, [and] one of the instructors is a beautiful former model, Blanche Rybizka.”
In the midst of one of the snowiest, most unsettled winters in decades, LIFE.com remembers that long-ago issue of LIFE — and the lovely Blanche Rybizka’s singular fashion sense — with a series of Alfred Eisenstaedt photos of Canadian winter scenery and winter finery.
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mont-Tremblant 1945
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Long before Yale Law, before Arkansas, before her marriage to Bill, before the Senate, the White House, her own runs for the White House, the State Department, and so many other highlights (and lowlights) of her remarkable life, she was Hillary Diane Rodham, the older sister of two brothers, and the over-achieving daughter of loving, politically conservative parents from suburban Park Ridge, Ill.
Intelligent, intensely curious and, from a young age, driven to find a way to contribute to the world around her, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965. It was there, in Massachusetts, that the moderate Republican underwent her transformation (she might characterize it as “an evolution”) to committed Democrat.
By the time she graduated from Wellesley in May 1969, Hillary Rodham was already such a notable figure that she was featured, along with four other speakers from four other schools and excerpts from their commencement addresses in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE, in an article titled, simply, “The Class of ’69.”
Her speech was, perhaps not surprisingly, less strident and confrontational than those of the other student speakers quoted in the issue. As early as 1969, Hillary was showing signs of her ability to modulate her message without diluting or compromising it that helps explain so much of her success in public life. The other student speakers featured in that June 1969 issue included Yale’s William Thompson; Justin Simon at Brandeis; Mills College’s Stephanie Mills, an author; and Brown University’s Ira Magaziner, a high-profile student activist who went on to become a business strategist and a senior adviser in the Clinton White House.
Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures by photographer Lee Balterman, only one of which ran in the June 20 issue of LIFE. The images were captured at the Rodham home in Park Ridge in mid-June 1969, a week and a half after she graduated from Wellesley. Leaving aside the insights into late-Sixties fashion that these pictures afford, the LIFE archives also contains insights into the younger Hillary that never made it into the magazine. For instance, in a note dated June 11, 1969, that accompanied Balterman’s film when it was sent from Illinois to LIFE’s offices in New York, we learn that Hillary told reporter Joan Downs that “press accounts of her commencement speech were vastly different from what she actually said because the speech wasn’t written out and taped transcripts were unavailable until several days after commencement.”
“She’s also quite concerned” the note continues, “that it be made clear she was not attacking Senator Brooke personally.” Senator Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate and the last Republican Senator elected from Massachusetts until Scott Brown’s election in 2010, spoke before Hillary Rodham at Wellesley’s commencement, and she deviated from her prepared remarks to address at least part of what he said.
Another Balterman note in the archive, meanwhile, written in the photographer’s own hand, points to a less dramatic, if no less revealing, element of the photo shoot: “Had to go for nothing more than informal portraits, but should be some good expressions & hand gestures, etc.,” the note reads, before ending with a simple, gentle suggestion: “Her glasses helped.”
—Photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
This image appeared in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.
Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
hillary-clinton-in-1969-14
Life Magazine
LIFE magazine, June 20, 1969, “Class of ’69” page spreads.
LIFE magazine, June 20, 1969, “Class of ’69” page spreads.
Artists and engineers share this bond: their visions are often first embodied in rough, rudimentary form. Whether it’s a sculptor working in clay or an industrial designer using three-dimensional software, modeling is not just part of the creative process: to a large degree, it is the creative process.
For NASA’s engineers, finding ways to model the remarkable craft that would not only land astronauts on the moon, but would allow them to lift off from the lunar surface, rendezvous and link up with an orbiting vessel and return safely to Earth and their families well, tackling that sort of challenge is the reason so many of the best and brightest join NASA in the first place.
Here, LIFE.com offers a series of images celebrating the various Lunar Excursion Modules—scale-model and life-size—that NASA built through the years; the men who flew them; and the brilliant, daring minds that envisioned the extraordinary spacecraft in the first place.
First deployed during Apollo 9’s 10-day mission in March 1969, roughly 100 miles above the earth, and tested again a few months later, less than 10 miles above the lunar surface during Apollo 10’s “dry run” for the July 1969 moon landing, the various versions of the lunar module that NASA designed and produced represent, in microcosm, pretty much everything technological that got people excited about the American space program in the 1960s.
After all, behind the craft’s complex development is an audaciously straightforward idea—enter moon’s orbit; separate from command module; land on moon; lift off from moon; reconnect with command module; come home—that would take years of effort (and not a few mistakes) to finally put into triumphant, era-defining practice.
In July 1969, when Apollo 11’s rendition of the LEM, Eagle, touched down on a vast lunar plain named Mare Tranquillitatis, or the Sea of Tranquility, centuries before by two Italian astronomers Neil Armstrong radioed a simple, momentous phrase to Mission Control a quarter-million miles away in Houston.
“The Eagle has landed,” he said, cementing the lunar module’s central role in one of humanity’s greatest dramas.
Early lunar module model, in wood, 1960s
Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Early lunar module model, 1960s.
Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lunar module model, 1969
Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A sketch made by Dr. John C. Houbolt in 1961 for a lunar module, later adopted by NASA for Apollo 9.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This sketch made by Dr. John C. Houbolt in 1961 shows a modular concept much like the one that was ultimately adopted by NASA for the Lunar Excursion Module.
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A sketch by Dr. John C. Houbolt suggested a design for a moon landing craft designated the “Lunar Schooner,” in 1961
Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A full-scale model of the Lunar Excursion Module, 1969.
The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
An astronaut descended the lunar module ladder during an enactment of a moon landing during a training exercise, 1967.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Apollo 9 and the lunar module, 1969
NASA
Apollo 9, March 1969. On the fourth day of the mission, astronaut David Scott stood in the open hatch of the command module and scanned the blue earth below.
NASA
The Apollo 9 Lunar Module, a.k.a., “Spider,” remained attached to the Saturn rocket stage while in low Earth orbit, March 1969.
NASA
The Apollo 9 Lunar Module (a 30,000 lb. vessel nicknamed “Spider” by crew members Scott, McDivitt and Schweichkart), 100 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, March 1969.
NASA
The Apollo 10 command module, piloted by astronaut John Young on his third space flight, entered into low orbit above the moon in May 1969 during a “dry run” for the July 1969 moon landing. The lunar module on this mission was nicknamed “Snoopy”; the command module was nicknamed “Charlie Brown.” (Charlie Brown, after all, rarely gets to have any fun. The same could not possibly be said of Young himself: he made six space flights over his 40-year career with NASA, and remains the only astronaut to have piloted four distinct classes of spacecraft: Gemini; the Apollo command and lunar modules; and the Space Shuttle.)
NASA
During Apollo 11’s historic moon mission in July 1969, astronaut Buzz Aldrin unfurled a “solar wind sheet” designed to collect atomic particles blowing from the distant sun. The Lunar Excursion Module, which got Aldrin and Neil Armstrong safely to and from the lunar surface, stood behind him.
NASA
With the Earth visible in the distance above the moon’s horizon, Apollo 11’s lunar module ascended toward the command module (piloted by astronaut Michael Collins while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface).
![For skiing at 40 degrees below zero Blanche [Rybizka] wears a deerhide jacket, a raccoon-edged hood, fur-lined mittens and two pairs of underwear under her trim pants.](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/12/141205-canada-winter-fashions-02-792x1024.jpg "Mont-Tremblant 1945")
