THEY were once the height of high tech, but now these relics of the US space age are just modern-day ruins.

“These things were the focus of the world’s attention 40, 50 years ago,” says photographer Roland Miller. “Now they’re rusting away and being torn down.”

Miller first came across them in 1988, when he was a photography professor at Brevard Community College in Florida, not far from Cape Canaveral. An environmental engineer at the Cape invited him to check out some materials in an old photo lab that hadn’t been used in 10 years. While there, he saw the crumbling remains of the complex that had launched the Gemini missions, NASA’s second human spaceflight programme.

“I knew immediately I had to get down there and photograph it,” he says. It took two years to get the necessary permissions. The resulting 23 years of photographs documenting the abandoned apparatus that supported early spacefaring efforts by the US will be published in the book Abandoned in Place in March.


Some photos show technology in its original context, like the Apollo Saturn V engine test stand at Edwards Air Force Base in California (top). Others, like that of the engine cluster for the same rocket (above), Miller deliberately composed to highlight the similarities to art and architecture from other times and cultures, in this case the ancient Egyptian bust of Nefertiti.

Some of the images get their power from what they represent. Of the photograph of the control room at a missile silo (above), Miller says: “That’s where world war three could have started. A silo like that.” The pictures also include a fan at a large wind tunnel at Langley Research Center (below) and computers at Cape Canaveral (bottom).

“We preserved civil war battlefields all over the country,” he says. “These are the cold war battlefields.”

(Images: Roland Miller)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Space age ghosts”