When people think of NASA, despite all the work it does monitoring the Earth's climate and exploring the bodies of the Solar System, most people's minds go to the Apollo era, when the US space agency repeatedly put humans on the Moon. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

But Apollo was not the agency's first steps into space, as newly restored photos from the pre-Apollo era show. Imaging specialist Andy Saunders , notable for being the person to find astronaut Alan Shepard's lost golf ball on the Moon , has carefully restored images from these earlier missions for a new book, Gemini and Mercury Remastered .

Project Mercury was the US's first spaceflight program, with the initial aims of putting humans into orbit a

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