Nasa Commons: 50 years of photos from the space agency

Rising gently over the Mojave desert outside Los Angeles, the Gossamer Penguin takes to the skies 40 years ago in one of the solar-powered aircraft's first test flights. The image is from a collection of photographs, Nasa Commons , that have been put together by Nasa, Flickr and Internet Archive to commemorate 50 years of photographing the space agency's spectacular ventures. Other pictures include images of the flights of manned capsules on America's early, flimsy Redstone rockets; tests of lunar landing vehicles; the lift-off of Apollo 11 on its historic flight to the moon; the launches of interplanetary probes such as the Mars Climate Observer and the Mars Polar Lander; and the construction of the agency's giant vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Most of the photographs are striking and spectacular – and contrast with the strange and gentle image of the Gossamer Penguin in flight. The plane, built for Nasa, had a 71ft wingspan, weighed just 68lbs without a pilot and was powered by a panel of 3,920 solar cells that generated 541 watts. The craft, designed to demonstrate the potential of solar power in the air, was flown by Janice Brown, a Bakersfield teacher, who weighed in at slightly under seven stone. She was a charter pilot with commercial, instrument and glider ratings and made around 40 flights on the Gossamer Penguin. The craft, she found, was awkward to fly. Wind direction, turbulence, convection, temperature and radiation in midsummer all proved to be headaches, particularly at takeoff when there had to be no crosswinds. Early mornings, when wind and turbulence were low, provided the best flying conditions but because the Sun was low in the horizon, the craft's panel of solar cells had to be tilted towards it. Nevertheless, Brown finished testing of the craft and on 7 August 1980 flew a public demonstration at the Dryden Flight Research Centre at the western edge of the Mojave desert, the first sustained flight of an aircraft that relied solely on direct solar power and provided its designers with practical experience for developing more advanced, solar-powered aircraft. Nasa sees the archive as "an opportunity for the public to participate in the process of discovery." It focuses on key figures in the agency's development, such as astronaut John Glenn (photographed in a shiny pressure suit before the launch of an early mission to orbit Earth) and Dr Robert H Goddard, a rocket expert, pictured watching tests from a small wooden shack on the fringes of a launchpad in 1963. The sandbags on the roof of Goddard's hut have been placed to protect him from "possible accident". As the time-spanning archive shows, safety measures have come on some since then.