David Daniel offers this story in honor of the anniversary of the July 20, 1969 Moon Landing.

Hasselblads on the Moon

By David Daniel

In a bar last night, dude I know says: You want a pristine Hasselblad camera? You can have it for free.

Okay, wise guy, I say. What’s the catch?

No catch.

No catch. A Hasselblad camera. Yeah right.

Straight up. But to get it you’ve gotta go to the moon.

He wasn’t kidding. I checked Google. During the Apollo lunar missions of 1969 to ‘72 American astronauts had to make a choice. They wanted to bring moon rocks back to Earth—a load of less than sixty pounds—but it wasn’t like the airport, where you can check an extra bag. That spacecraft was pretty cramped, and weight was an issue. So they left a dozen Hasselblad cameras, the very ones they’d used to shoot those lonely lunar landscapes we’ve all seen. Feature that. Hasselblads, just lying there like beer cans along a Granite State highway.

Couldn’t some follow-up mission have retrieved them? And what other gear, not counting Titleist golf balls (made in the Bay State), might be half-lifing away up there, just a quarter million miles out of reach? Other stuff that’d make some Earthling’s life easier.

And speaking of that, how come no one but Americans ever went to the Moon?

The Hasselblad is a very fine piece of optical machinery, made in Sweden. The 70 mm Hasselblad 500s were fitted with precision-built German Zeiss lenses (also very fine machinery—like almost everything German-made, excepting, of course, their World War II Reich-of-a-Thousand-Years meat grinder, which ultimately, thank God, proved to be shit). The Hasselblads cost $12,000 apiece x 12.

That’s a lot of cheddar to lay out in exchange for some rocks, which we’ve got an abundance of on earth already. But there the cameras sit, patient in the cratered dust, waiting for me, or someone like me, to go fetch them. Hard to believe it’s been 55 years ago this month.

I mean, hell, if I’d had one of those Hasselblads back then I might be a wedding photographer now, or a staff shooter for the Sierra Club and you’d see my images of Mt. Whitney in autumn and the Painted Desert on your datebook calendar, right next to where you write in your dentist appointment or your ex-husband’s new girlfriend’s phone number.

Though who can say? Most people keep all that stuff on their phone now. And anyway, maybe I’d have sold the camera for a couple mini moon rocks of crack and I’d be the strung-out ghost on the street lying to you each morning saying he wants a cup of coffee when, deep inside, what he really wants, like all of us, is another chance.