In his new book "Abandoned in Place," photographer Roland Miller takes readers on a visually stunning, emotionally charged tour of various abandoned facilities connected to NASA's space program, including now-unused launchpads and retired science facilities. Miller's images highlight the age and decay of these locations, but also forge a connection to their past lives.
Miller spoke with Space.com about how he first began photographing these sites more than 30 years ago, and what he hoped to convey with his particular approach to this visual documentation. In addition to the photographs, the book includes essays by Miller, and people connected to the various sites.
Paired with the photographs are essays by Miller, as well as a handful of essays written by people with very different connections to the space program.
"I approached quite a number of people I knew in the space industry — and I guess it was one of the happy accidents, because these were the folks that responded and said, 'Yeah, I'd like to do that,'" Miller said.
"I think it actually fit very well with the flow of the book to have an art historian write the introduction and kind of describe the history of space and art," Miller said, referring to Betsy Fahlman, a professor of art history at Arizona State University. Craig Covault, an aerospace journalist who has "covered every U.S. space launch since Apollo," according to a statement from the book's publisher, wrote an essay about Launch Complexes 40 and 41, two locations that had great significance in the early days of human spaceflight and thathave been repurposed for new phases of human spaceflight.
Col. Pamela Melroy, a former NASA astronaut and space shuttle commander, penned an essay about Launch Complex 34 for the book. In the essay, she touches on one of the great tragedies of NASA's human spaceflight program: It was on that launchpad that the Apollo 1 capsule caught fire during a test exercise, killing all three men inside. Melroy mentions in the essay her work on the Columbia reconstruction team — the group tasked with sifting through the wreckage of the shuttle that was destroyed on its way back to Earth.
"[Complex 34] became a touchstone for her during that very, very difficult work," Miller said. "She came up with a beautiful essay regarding how that site affected her. And I think [her essay] is a tribute to all the fallen astronauts."