With the start of the new academic year our publishing schedule has recommenced, and we are delighted to begin with the opening of the special collection of photographs from ESA’s predecessor ELDO. This collection spans the 1960s and early 1970s and documents the activities of the first European organisation working on the development of a European launcher.
ELDO was the European Launcher Development Organisation (or European Space Vehicle Launcher Development Organisation), active from 1964 until its merger with the ESRO, the European Space Research Organisation, to form ESA in 1975.
This collection therefore perfectly complements the existing ESRO and ESA photographic collections currently open in the SHIP database and currently covering the years 1964 to 1978.
Approximately half of the photographs take ELDO’s equatorial launch base in Kourou (BEC/Kourou) as their subject, and capture its different facets, from technical installations such as the assembly hall, launch tower, or control room to more prosaic images of the canteen and rest room! The remainder are divided between photographs of the various stages or elements of the EUROPA launcher, and of ELDO’s telemetry stations in Brazil. Many of them are elegantly composed and stunning images in their own right, with series 8 in particular including beautiful and almost abstract imagery of the Matra capsule and perigee motor.
The material in these different collections, and how much we know about it, also holds up a mirror to the difference between ELDO and ESRO. This is amply demonstrated in the large gaps in what we understand about the provenance of the ELDO photographs, nearly all of which have no named photographer and little in the way of description. They generally relate to key events or activities and were possibly gathered together as a collection from different sources, including different photographers.
This can be contrasted with ESRO where we know that dedicated photographers formed part of the staff complement and were actively engaged in documenting day-to-day life, people and activities across the organisation, and where organisational systems for the cataloguing of contact sheets were in place.
This results in several issues with reuse of these photographs on the internet today. For example, on websites and in publications with no mention of their ELDO provenance, which compounds the problem. (At the very least, the relevant archive should always be named when using material that originates from it.) Or, perhaps worse, the potentially mistaken captioning of EUROPA launches. The ESA Archives holds a mere handful of photographic prints of these launches, leading us to believe that many more pictures have been lost. And of those few that exist, we cannot with any certainty be sure which launch is which.
And then we have the issue of ‘negative space’ – how we can explain the generally acknowledged ‘failure’ of ELDO as an organisation with the lack of archival source material.
A feasibility study undertaken in 1989 in advance of the ESA History Project, discovered in the ESA Archives at the Historical Archives of the EU, sheds some light on how this came about. It elaborates on how an ELDO Documentation Group was set up in November 1974 under the ESRO/ELDO Space Documentation Service, to process documentation generated by ELDO programmes, while the organisation was in the process of being liquidated. Some 1600 documents were selected for their scientific and technological value for cataloguing, abstracting and indexing, to produce an Index of ELDO Publications (ESA SP-1006, September 1977) including manuals, procedures, specifications and drawings. Tragically, “Little is known about the final destiny of the other ELDO documents; most probably they have been destroyed”.
As an outcome, these photographs assume a new importance, giving us valuable insights into this lesser documented chapter of European space.
More information
To browse the ELDO images, enter the SHIP database and search for ‘ELDO photos’. You can also find a clickable link to the collection in the list of topics on the SHIP homepage.
Read more about the ELDO photographic collection.
Spotted a photograph that looks familiar?
Don’t forget that logged in users of SHIP can add annotations to images to share information that might currently be missing from their descriptions. Find out how here!
