In 1995, while I was working as a photographer, I had a chance meeting in Berlin with a producer who was filming a documentary about Nasa’s astronauts. I was asked to take some publicity shots, and of course I accepted. On December 6, I entered Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the same control centre that had made history with the Apollo moon landing in 1969.
There were six astronauts preparing for mission STS-72, which would depart from Earth on the Endeavour Space Shuttle with an assignment to bring back a Japanese research spacecraft from orbit. Brian Duffy, a former Air Force pilot, was the mission’s commander.
Over the next month, the film crew and I travelled between the Nasa space centres in Florida and Texas on numerous budget flights. The astronauts, on the other hand, made the commute in their personal Nasa T-38 supersonic jets. Many of the images I made were in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a large swimming pool where the astronauts took part in complex and dangerous training exercises simulating the weightlessness they would experience during space travel.