In The Shadow Of Giants: A Childhood Wonder Reignited - Images From The Kennedy Space Center
My recent relocation from the concrete jungle of Chicago to the tropics of Southeast Florida has opened up a whole new world for my lens. I am starting to find, appreciate, and photograph some of the beautiful, remarkable, and entirely new-to-me locations here in the Sunshine State. Recently, that exploration led me to the Kennedy Space Center on the Space Coast.
I have always been curious about this place, especially as a kid who grew up during the heyday of the Space Shuttle Program. I can still vividly remember sitting in my elementary school classroom watching the Challenger launch—witnessing, yet not quite understanding, the tragedy we had just watched unfold. After that, I became obsessed with shuttle liftoffs. I watched almost every single launch on television, tracking them as they broke through the clouds to reach places in the sky and space I thought only existed in movies like Superman: The Movie or Star Wars. To finally stand as an adult on the exact patch of earth I had stared at with such childhood awe was a bucket-list moment I never thought I'd actually realize.
The following portfolio is made up of images of the places and things I was most eager to see firsthand. This isn’t your typical tourist-style photo collection of the Kennedy Space Center. It isn’t meant to look like the images you’d see in a promotional brochure for the complex or its museums. Instead, it’s a visual capture of the storytelling behind my childhood wonder. To me, this portfolio isn’t about documenting a thing or a place; it’s about capturing what it felt like to stand in its shadow.
The first of these subjects is NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building. I grew up seeing this building in documentaries, but as a film lover, I also knew it as a cinematic backdrop in the movie Contact. The building had become somewhat of a celebrity to me. Seeing it in person felt equivalent to the moments in my career when I met the likes of Matt Damon, Brendan Fraser, or Steven Soderbergh. It is a beautiful, massive structure—towering exponentially larger than I ever imagined it could be. Someone at the complex told me that the American flag painted on the side is the exact size of a regulation NBA basketball court. It stands like a giant cube, lording over the launchpad-filled landscape around it.
Being a kid of the '80s, the Shuttle Program was front and center for most of my youth. While I was aware of the prior Apollo era—mostly through watching the movie Apollo 13—I was largely unfamiliar with the nuances of its history and its foundational influence on NASA. Now, with the immense fanfare surrounding the current Artemis missions, which look structurally much more like the days of Apollo, I wanted to learn more. I wanted to see the similarities and trace the advancements made since that first giant leap.
Standing under the Saturn V F-1 engines at the Apollo/Saturn V Center and gazing up at those beautifully gargantuan engine nozzles, I couldn’t help but think of the sheer power, sound, and force those five engines unleashed. If you look closely, you can see the scars etched inside them from the ferocious heat required to propel that massive weight, lifting the rocket and capsule above them to escape Earth’s gravity.
Then comes the Apollo 14 Command Module. I was entirely unprepared for the emotional weight of looking at this piece of machinery. Having traveled nearly half a million miles to the moon and back, the capsule’s surface is a canvas of charring, pitting, and discoloration from its violent reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. This was one of the most mentally loud pieces of history I think I have ever seen. To think that the outside of this capsule battled such intense heat and friction, while simultaneously peering through the open hatch to see the fragile, pristine interior that kept its human crew safe and alive, was strikingly remarkable. Seeing these two pieces—the raw power of the rocket and the resilience of the capsule—was one of the most humbling experiences I’ve ever had staring at metal.
Next came my time with the Space Shuttle Atlantis. This is what the kid inside of me had wanted to see in person for decades. To think that I had watched this exact machine on my television as a child, launching over and over into space, and now I was standing right next to it—displayed like a polar bear at the zoo—was mind-boggling. It has flown into space 33 times. It docked with the MIR Space Station and the ISS. It helped astronauts service the Hubble Telescope. And there I was, held in absolute awe, looking over the battle scars on its thermal tiles from its trips back through the atmosphere. If this machine could talk, I would pull up a folding chair and listen to everything it had to say.
My final image is of an astronaut’s spacesuit displayed at the Atlantis exhibit. Though this particular suit is a replica and not a flown artifact, it captured my attention in a profound way. As a photographer, I am accustomed to showing the world, places, and events through my own eyes—through my lens. But staring at that helmet, I realized that my entire day spent at KSC had actually challenged me to see the world through an astronaut’s eyes instead of my own. I’ve been told that my photography often offers viewers a unique or different perspective on a subject. On this day, however, I was the one being shown a completely unique, completely different experience of our world, viewed through the curvature of that visor.
Ultimately, this experience became more than just documenting space history; it was a profound reminder of the wonder of being a kid and seeing something far greater than I ever could have imagined. When I look through my viewfinder, I search for the stories that connect us, or that speak to something deeper than the subject itself. Standing where heroes once stood, looking out at a world that seems both immense and incredibly fragile, I hope you feel a piece of that childhood wonder in these images.
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