NEW YORK—Michael Soluri is a New York-based photographer with the jealousy-inducing privilege of photographing a unique portion of space exploration: behind the scenes of NASA’s STS-125 mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. He spent three years photographing the crew and support personnel at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, Texas, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Launched in January of 1990, the Hubble was repaired five times by Shuttle missions, but the fifth mission was "really a spectacular mission," according to Eric Boehm, aviation curator of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York. Along with the first mission to repair Hubble's optics, SM4 was the most important mission to keep the Hubble operational, replacing and upgrading the main data unit, batteries, and camera.

Many of Soluri's photos can be seen in his recently released book, Infinite Worlds, which explores his fascination with human spaceflight. The photos capture the joys and difficulties behind the scenes, such as astronaut water training at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) and the construction of the unique tools built for the mission. Soluri even spent time guiding the crew as they took their own photographs in space. He said his experience offered "insight that gave context to the purpose of human spaceflight."

Nathan Fitch

Jennifer Hahn

Michael Soluri

Michael Soluri

Michael Soluri

Michael Soluri

In addition to photographing the people behind the mission, some of the most important pieces in Soluri’s photo project are the ingenious, one-of-a-kind tools used by the astronauts to repair and upgrade the Hubble. Several of these beautiful, still-life photos are on display at the "Hubble@25" exhibit inside the Intrepid's Space Shuttle Pavilion next to some of the actual tools used by the astronauts. We toured the exhibit with Soluri and Boehm, learning about the missions and how Soluri’s photos work as a centerpiece.

One fascinating tool on display is the Indexing Card Extraction Tool, which was needed to extract damaged circuit boards—it was built to pull out the cards since the astronauts could not fit their gloved fingers into the slots to pull them out. Another ingenious invention is the ACS Fastener Capture Plate, which was built to remove 32 fasteners while preventing the screws from flying away into space. Alongside the real tools on display at the exhibit are the initial sketches that show the thought process used to create them. These original sketches were such a find that they made Boehm giddy because they showed the thought process "directly from brain to pencil to paper."

Photos of several astronauts and crew featured in the book also show up at the Hubble exhibit at the museum, including Jill McGuire and Justin Cassidy, who designed and built some of the unique tools used to service the Hubble, and Mike Massimino, a mission specialist on both STS-125 and STS-109 who used the tools. The exhibit also shows the astronaut training process, the history of the Hubble telescope, the stories of all the missions sent to repair it, and the future of space exploration (the James Webb Space Telescope).

Another interesting piece of history that Soluri was able to preserve in his photographs was Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. For almost 50 years, vehicles launched humans to the moon and into low Earth Orbit from this structure, but with the end of the shuttle era it has been partially dismantled and leased by SpaceX.

"Armstrong left from that launch pad to go to the moon, this crew left to go to the Hubble," Soluri said. "And what did the Hubble do afterward? Basically, the Hubble extended man's ability to explore the mysteries of the universe." He added that the flame trenches caked with scorched blast outlines from the hundreds of launches reminded him of the caves of Lascaux: "to me, this was something that was not only ethereal, but it was temporary."

A portion of Infinite Worlds was shot on film (Hasselblad), and Soluri was required to wear a clean suit when shooting the tools due to the sensitivity of the mission. Soluri shot many other photos for NASA's New Horizon Pluto mission on a Canon 5DS, a 50 megapixel camera, to complete the project.

The "Hubble@25" exhibit sits underneath the Space Shuttle Enterprise in its Space Shuttle Pavillion on the deck of the Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum and has been extended through January 10, 2016. Michael Soluri's book, Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration, was released in November of 2014.

Listing image by Michael Soluri