The Hasselblad 500C, the Square Swedish Camera That Went to Space

On October 3, 1962, Wally Schirra rode Sigma 7 into orbit from Cape Canaveral and circled the Earth six times in a little over nine hours. Strapped in with him was a camera he had bought himself that summer at a photo shop in Houston, for about $500. It was a Hasselblad 500C, a boxy Swedish import that magazine photographers swore by, and NASA engineers had stripped it down for the trip.

A trading family in Gothenburg

Victor Hasselblad was born in Gothenburg on March 8, 1906, into a family whose trading business, F. W. Hasselblad and Co., had been founded in the city in 1841. He was sent abroad as a young man to learn the photography trade, including a stint in Dresden, and in 1937 he opened his own photo store and lab back home.

The war turned a shopkeeper into a manufacturer. In 1940 officers of the Swedish Air Force asked him to build a camera that could rival one recovered from a German reconnaissance aircraft shot down over Sweden. In 1941 he founded Victor Hasselblad AB to make cameras for the military.

Peace meant he needed civilian customers. In 1948 the company introduced the 1600F in New York City, a single-lens reflex that shot square 6 by 6 centimeter frames on roll film behind a focal-plane shutter reaching 1/1600 of a second. The square format was borrowed from the Rolleiflex, then the benchmark for a compact camera with big negatives. The idea was sound, but the shutter was fragile, and the 1000F that followed from 1953 to 1957 slowed it down for reliability. By then Zeiss had become the lens supplier.

The shutter moves into the lens

The fix was radical for its day. Instead of a shutter in the body, every lens would carry its own. Hasselblad had 500C prototypes in development by 1953, and the finished camera launched in 1957. Each lens housed a Synchro-Compur leaf shutter running from 1 second to 1/500, and because a leaf shutter opens fully at every speed, the camera could sync with electronic flash at all of them. Earlier models had synced only at slow speeds.

The standard lens was a Carl Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8, and at launch the camera and that lens together cost $480. The body itself was a cube. A waist-level finder sat on top, the lens bayonet on the front and a removable film magazine on the back. A standard back gave 12 square frames on 120 film, and others took 220 film, smaller formats or perforated 70mm stock. Everything was a module, and that is why photographers held on to their kits for decades.

Hasselblad built roughly 76,700 500C bodies from 1957 to 1970. Ansel Adams shot Moon and Half Dome with one in 1960, and the company's own history credits the 500C with portraits of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s. If the Leica M6 was the rangefinder of reporters, the Hasselblad was the camera of people who could set up a tripod and wait.

Sigma 7 and a camera with no mirror

Schirra's choice was a step up. John Glenn had carried a $40 Ansco Autoset bought in Cocoa Beach, Florida, on his flight earlier that year. NASA bought more 500Cs to modify. According to Hasselblad's account of its space program, engineers removed the leather covering, the reflex mirror, the auxiliary shutter and the viewfinder, and fitted a magazine that held 70 exposures instead of 12. The body was painted a dull black to cut reflections inside the capsule.

The pictures from Sigma 7 were a mixed bag. Heavy cloud and overexposure spoiled many of them. The camera, though, worked, and that was what NASA needed to know. Simplified 500C cameras flew on the last two Mercury missions in 1962 and 1963 and stayed in service through the Gemini flights of 1965 and 1966. In June 1965, Jim McDivitt used a Hasselblad to photograph Ed White floating outside Gemini IV during his spacewalk.

Cameras left on the Moon

For Apollo, Hasselblad moved to the motorized 500EL, introduced in 1965, which handled the film advance so astronauts in pressurized gloves did not have to. The lunar surface version was the Hasselblad Data Camera, a silver 500EL fitted with a Zeiss Biogon 60mm f/5.6. Its magazines held thin Kodak film for far more frames than a standard roll, and a reseau plate in front of the film printed small cross marks on every negative. The controls were enlarged for gloved fingers and lubricated to cope with temperatures that swung from above 120 degrees Celsius in sunlight to below minus 65 in shade.

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed, and the Data Camera rode on Neil Armstrong's chest. He kept it for nearly the whole moonwalk, which is why almost every famous photograph from that first landing shows Buzz Aldrin. A second camera, a black electric model with an 80mm Planar, stayed inside the lunar module.

Then the crew left both behind. Every gram counted on the climb back to orbit, so the astronauts kept the film magazines and abandoned the bodies and lenses. The practice continued through Apollo 17. Hasselblad counts twelve camera bodies left on the lunar surface, though Wikipedia's entry puts the figure at eleven. The Omega Speedmaster came home on the astronauts' wrists. The Hasselblads did not.

The long afterlife of a square

Back on Earth, the 500C gave way to the 500C/M in 1970, which added interchangeable focusing screens. The family kept going through the 503CW and ended with the 503CWD in 2006, a digital-back model released for what would have been Victor Hasselblad's 100th birthday. Victor sold the company in 1976 and died in 1978, leaving SEK 78 million to the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation.

A cube, a lens and a back that comes off in your hand. The 500C was industrial design shaped by how it worked, and it ended up looking better than almost anything else on a tripod. It sits in the same lineage of cameras as tools as the Polaroid SX-70, the Fujifilm X100 and the Ricoh GR, each built around one clear idea about how pictures get made.

For more, see cameras, tech history, industrial design and the Quiet Menace tech section. The Wikipedia entry on Hasselblad covers the whole lineup, the Apollo cameras included.

The neat part of the story is that it started as a personal purchase. One astronaut walked into a Houston shop and paid his own money for the camera he wanted. Within a decade, about a dozen of its descendants sat on the Moon, and they are still sitting there.