They left Earth in antique capsules perched on top of a million pounds of explosives - the largest rockets ever built.
They navigated with wristwatches, slide-rules, and primitive computers with less processing power than a basic cellphone.
And they took pictures. America's first unmanned satellites carried chemical darkrooms on board, where film was developed, translated into radio waves, and beamed back to Earth. On the ground, the satellites' analog photographic data was stored on magnetic tapes.