Steven Heller Gives Away the NASA Archive He Started at Nine

Steven Heller founded the Astronaut Fan Club in 1959, aged nine, shortly after NASA introduced the Mercury Seven, and spent the following decades writing to the agency for brochures, booklets and photographs. What came back filled two legal boxes that travelled with him through every apartment and office he ever occupied. His column walks through what survived: club circulars he typed himself, astronaut correspondence, early mission literature, the paper residue of a boy's fixation on space. After sixty six years he has handed the whole thing to a new caretaker, writing that all things must pass, and hoping researchers of the early space programme will want it.