It was near-mutiny by the astronaut corps at the time (all seven of them!) that made NASA bend enough to put a window or two in the capsule (which name the astronauts also hated, apparently, preferring the term "spacecraft").

NASA was woefully unaware of exactly what people could do in outer space, since they'd never sent a human up for more than a few minutes. They wanted to get people up and back down safely, to prove to the Russkies we were as good as they were. They simply weren't thinking about things like taking pictures. The astronauts, in contrast, were hotshots (even staid, conservative John Glenn). They spent their lives pushing the envelope, and going round and round in a highly automated tin can was less than they imagined doing. John Glenn taking a camera along for the ride was probably the tamest thing he thought he could get away with.

Storytelling is both incredibly powerful to people, and also super easy to forget or deprioritize in the face of challenging engineering demands.

It’s far more prosaic than the space program, but I’ve seen many examples of fantastic web engineering projects that went unappreciated (by customers, by management, by the press) simply because there was no story of what happened and why it mattered.

NASA has definitely learned this lesson; look at the effort they put into storytelling with images like Hubble Deep Field, the photos of Pluto, and (especially) the Mars rovers.

I'm as surprised as you are. But the more I think about it, the more I can see how this could happen.

It's kind of a hindsight thing given we know how the space program played out. But at that time, the entire mindset might have been, "we just need to get to space and not kill our pilot."

> This is the most surprising. Why was it so?

How about 'let's get him back alive'. If that had not happened there quite likely would have been no program or a big delay in the program.

The writer (as is typical looks at upside not downside of attention to certain details) is predictably glib with that as if 'geez why wouldn't they thought pictures were important!'

Maybe engineering vs PR? Rarely people are good at both.