NASA's space graveyards are scattered across the country. Abandoned launch pads and research facilities are a postcard from an era when our collective attention, and most of our resources, was focused on space exploration.For the past 25 years, Roland Miller has been capturing images of these places in a project called "Abandoned in Place" that's one part art, one part historical documentation, and multiple parts cool-as-hell.
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"As a photographer, they're really beautiful spaces and one of the challenges was not to make 'old barn' photographs, if you will, not to just rely on the nostalgia but to try to get deeper than that," said Roland, who teaches at the College of Lake County in Chicago."The aging of these sites is a good metaphor for our own temporal nature on this earth. It really spoke to me on a number of levels."
Roland's interest was first piqued when he got to visit Cape Canaveral back in 1988. An old office space was being cleared out and chemicals from the photo lab were being donated to the local community college where Roland was teaching. When he saw the space, he knew he wanted to capture it on film.
Over the years, NASA has granted him access to abandoned sites across the United States—always accompanied with a NASA rep—from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral in Florida. Roland made it clear he's not trying to criticize the space agency for not keeping up the facilities, but rather documenting the history and the contribution they've made to our exploration of the universe.
Next year, with the help of a KickStarter fundraiser that ends Sunday, Roland will publish about 100 of the photos in a large-format, coffee table book. Though he's wanted to put together a book for years, he's glad he took his time because now he has a diverse and captivating collection to share."It's a much broader, fuller body of work."Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated the Marshall Space Flight Center is in California. It is in Alabama. We regret the error.