Hasselblad 500C: the camera Schirra took into orbit

November 11, 2026|Toni

Chrome Hasselblad 500C medium-format camera seen from the front left, with black leatherette, waist-level viewfinder raised and a Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8 lens

October 3, 1962. Navy pilot Wally Schirra spends 9 hours, 13 minutes and 10 seconds in orbit aboard Sigma 7, and for part of that time he points a Hasselblad at the Earth. The camera is a medium-format 500C with a Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8 lens, and Schirra is the astronaut who suggested NASA use it.

That makes the Hasselblad 500C the first camera of its maker to fly in space. How it got onto the flight is told in three versions that do not quite agree: Hasselblad's, NASA's and Schirra's own.

Camera: Hasselblad 500C, 6x6 medium format, Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8
Mission: Mercury-Atlas 8, Sigma 7, October 3, 1962, six orbits
Person: Walter M. "Wally" Schirra, pilot of Mercury-Atlas 8
What made it different: a standard camera chosen by an astronaut, then changed for the flight

Who chose the first Hasselblad in space?

Schirra did, according to Hasselblad's own history of its space work. The company says he owned a 500C with a Planar 80mm lens, and that he suggested NASA use a Hasselblad because the previous camera had produced disappointing results. NASA then bought a few 500Cs, the company says.

The disappointment is easy to place. Earlier that year, John Glenn had carried a 35mm Ansco Autoset made by Minolta, bought at a drugstore and modified for his pressure suit. We told that story in John Glenn's camera: the drugstore Minolta that went into orbit.

Digital Camera World describes Schirra as part of a group of astronauts and engineers trying to avoid missed photo opportunities. In that account, he proposed his own camera with one line: "Why don't we use this one?"

A Houston shop, two photographers and a lab at the Cape

The purchase has two versions. Hasselblad USA says Schirra, then not yet famous, bought the 500C at a Houston photo supply shop. collectSPACE, which reports on space collecting and history, notes there is no evidence beyond anecdote that he bought it himself.

Schirra gave his own version in a 1998 NASA oral history interview, as collectSPACE reports it. He said he picked the Hasselblad after asking photographers at LIFE and National Geographic which model they would recommend.

The modifications have two versions as well. Hasselblad USA says the leatherette was stripped and the metal body painted black to reduce reflections. Schirra told NASA that a laboratory at Cape Canaveral did the work, per collectSPACE.

Was the camera changed, or not?

Accounts differ here. NASA's history office describes unmodified Hasselblad 550C cameras flying on the last two one-man Mercury missions, in 1962 and 1963. Hasselblad and Schirra both describe a changed camera, and Hasselblad's page also names the 500C rather than the 550C.

A second Hasselblad passage adds detail about space versions of the camera, without dating each change to a flight. It says the team removed the leather covering, the auxiliary shutter, the reflex mirror and the viewfinder to save weight. It also says they built a film magazine with 70 exposures instead of the usual 12, and used a matte black finish against reflections in the spacecraft window.

The page does not say which of those changes were on Schirra's camera in 1962. Treat the black paint and the stripped leather as the best-supported changes to his body, and treat the rest as later space practice.

Chrome Hasselblad 500C seen from the front right on a pale surface, with the viewfinder hood open, a Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8 lens and the exposure-value dial on the side of the lens — A Hasselblad 500C in its standard form: chrome, black leatherette and a waist-level viewfinder. Schirra's flight camera was changed for the mission. Title: Hasselblad 500C (51026812302). Author: Nicolas Buffler. Source: Wikimedia Commons, from Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

What did it do over six orbits?

Of four planned science experiments, Schirra operated two, according to NASA's history page for the flight. One of them was photographing the Earth with a modified handheld Hasselblad. Sigma 7 splashed down in the Pacific about 4.5 miles from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge, and Schirra called the mission a textbook flight at a press conference.

His own verdict on the photographs was modest. collectSPACE quotes him: "We got some good pictures." He added that he was too busy with the rest of the flight to take better ones.

One camera body, two astronauts?

The camera had a second flight. Gordon Cooper flew a Hasselblad on Mercury-Atlas 9, Faith 7, in May 1963. RR Auction, which offered a 500C body for sale in 2014 and linked it to both flights, says Cooper signed two letters attesting that he used it.

That is where the record gets tangled. RR Auction states only that the body it sold was confirmed as flown on Schirra's mission. A 1994 auction by a house that no longer exists had claimed a different body as Schirra's. Its photographs match the marks on Cooper's body after Faith 7, which suggests that the two astronauts may have switched bodies at some point.

Smithsonian curator Jennifer Levasseur asked why the photographs of the MA-8 and MA-9 bodies differ, given that the mission report, as collectSPACE describes it, says one Hasselblad flew on both missions. Nobody in these sources answers the question. A reader can hold both stories at once: one Hasselblad on paper, and at least two bodies in the photographs.

From Sigma 7 to the Moon

After the two Mercury flights, Hasselblads stayed. NASA says they remained the mainstay of the two-man Gemini flights in 1965 and 1966. On Apollo 8, electric Hasselblad EL cameras flew for the first time, with 80mm and 250mm lenses and seven 70mm film magazines. Those cameras had no reflex viewfinder, so the crew aimed with a sighting ring.

Apollo 11, which landed on July 20, 1969, carried three Hasselblad 500EL cameras. One stayed in the command module Columbia, and two went down to the surface in the lunar module Eagle. The surface data camera carried a reseau plate that recorded grid markings on every frame.

Later missions asked more of the cameras. Apollo 15 added a 250mm telescopic lens to the surface kit, and by Apollo 17, eighteen rolls of film went down to the lunar surface.

Then comes the part that surprises people. Hasselblad says that from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17, twelve camera bodies were left on the lunar surface, and that only the film magazines came back. NASA's history office says the Apollo 11 data camera and its lens were left at Tranquility Base, where they still rest. Hasselblad says both Apollo 11 surface cameras stayed behind, so the two accounts differ on that detail.

The reason is weight. Hasselblad cites the limits for the return trip, and PetaPixel, in an unsourced post, ties the decision to making room for about 25kg of lunar samples.

What stays with the 500C

In 1962, an astronaut put his own Hasselblad 500C into a Mercury capsule. Seven years later, Hasselblad cameras built for NASA were photographing the Moon.

The 500C is now a camera a collector can still find, often with a chrome body, a Planar 80mm lens and a waist-level viewfinder like the ones above. You can browse all medium format cameras in the shop. Another camera with a disputed story, Robert Capa's Contax II, is in Capa's Contax II: what happened to the D-Day film.