NASASOURCE: Matt Loughrey Astronaut John Glenn in 1962 during Project Mercury, which completed six manned spaceflights between 1961 and 1963. Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.



In 2015, NASA released a trove of nostalgic photographs documenting the American-Soviet space race of the 20th century: beaming astronauts preparing for their missions, tense moments at the command center, engineers posing beside the Apollo mission software code. Among those sifting through the thousands of images online was Matt Loughrey, a photographer based in the sleepy, pub-filled Irish village of Westport.

"I remember being young and hearing stories from my dad about watching the space race," he recalls. "We had encyclopedias, and everything was monochromatic—it felt distant."

NASASOURCE: Matt Loughrey Mission Control at Kennedy Space Center in 1969. The Apollo 11 mission brought astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., to the moon.



Earlier this year, Loughrey had taken a picture of his grandmother and colorized it. The resulting image pulled the subject out of the past and made her easier to reconcile with the modern world.

That prompted him to imagine the impact color versions of the NASA photographs could have on a young viewer. The images showed "bravery, a pinch of madness, a lot of tried and tested knowledge, and the confidence of trusting your life in the hands of others," he says.

NASASOURCE: Matt Loughrey NASA computer programmer Margaret Hamilton stands next to the code she helped develop for the Apollo program in 1969. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. "I've grown up in a world where NASA seemed to be dominated by male figures, and I'd just assumed that's the way it was," says Loughrey. "But there were amazing women behind NASA as well."



His idea was given further encouragement when his 7-year-old son, George, posed a question to his dad: "Was the world always in black and white?" Loughrey explained to him that the world has always been as vibrant as we see it now, but the tools for capturing it have changed. "I realized that he'd stumbled upon a poignant observation."

Loughrey started painstakingly transforming them. Using a neural network—software that uses an algorithm to predict the real-life colors of a grayscale picture—he turned the black-and-white images into glorious windows into the past.

Since the backgrounds were crowded with command consoles, buttons, and flags, transforming just a dozen pictures took him 300 hours. It was tedious but peaceful work. "There's a nice feeling looking at a photo coming to life in color, but you're the only person in the world who can see it for a short while," he says.

NASASOURCE: Matt Loughrey NASA flight controller and engineer John Aaron in 1969. During a crisis when lightning hit the Apollo 12 spaceship, Aaron's quick thinking and knowledge of obscure controls may have saved the mission.



NASASOURCE: Matt Loughrey At age 36, astronaut Gordon Cooper was the youngest of the seven Mercury astronauts. On May 15, 1963, he set an endurance record when he traveled 3,312,993 miles in 190 hours and 56 minutes.



NASASOURCE: Matt Loughrey Celebrations take over the control room as Apollo 13 Commander James A. Lovell is seen on screen in 1972. The near-disastrous lunar mission returned to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded and damaged the spacecraft.



He hopes these color images will excite a younger generation of explorers and scientists. "The light was never shown fully across NASA and what went into it," he says. "When we look at stories long ago, it's a point of self-reflection."

Loughrey has a few more NASA photographs to color, but he already has his hands full with new projects. He's working with a History Channel documentary about the Anglin brothers, who, along with another inmate, pulled off perhaps the only successful escape from Alcatraz in 1962, and he is hoping to collaborate with the Library of Congress to colorize photos of the Dust Bowl.