Air and Space: NASA Photographer Bill Ingalls Has One of the Coolest Jobs on the Planet

By Mark Strauss

    Bill Ingalls has been a contract photographer for NASA for 30 years, and in that time, he's been almost everywhere.

"How Ingalls has approached the task of documenting the U.S. space program is reflected in a comment about the end of the space shuttle era...After taking one photo after another of the spacecraft, he realized the real story was the “people on the ground pointing and looking up with their jaws dropped. I was like, ‘There’s the emotion, there’s the tie-in.’ ” Portraying the emotions of the space program...has made Ingalls only the second photographer ever to receive the prestigious National Space Club Press Award."

    In 2011, he photographed astronauts returning after 5 months on the ISS in Kazakhstan, apparently getting lucky when another photographer's flash happened to backlight his scene.

"'What can I do different?' is a question that Ingalls asks himself when he’s on an assignment. 'As a professional photographer who covers some of this often and repetitively, you get bored,' he says."

    He has also captured the moment when, in 2018, a booster failed in a spacecraft and two astronauts safely returned to Earth. "'It was not until this moment when you could see it between Nick and his wife, that you feel this could have been a really bad day,' recalls Ingalls." Ingalls also says that luck is part of photography. Once, when he was in a helicopter to shoot the space shuttle Discovery being taken away on a 747, his pilot took him on a detour around the Washington Monument for an excellent unplanned aerial shot. But to take advantage of such opportunities, one has to know all their equipment so that they are ready for anything, such as a bird shot in front of a 747 and the space shuttle Endeavour.

"'One of the things I’m often asked is, ''How do you make a good moonrise, moonset, sunrise, or sunset photo?,'' says Ingalls. 'The real key in trying to make something interesting is tying it into your place and where you are and what’s going on.'"