‘Look closely and there’s a tear in Armstrong’s eye’: the Apollo space missions as you’ve never seen them before

Time must be made for awe and wonder. You can forget your environment when you work in space because you are so focused. It can be difficult to process the isolation until you return to Earth.

The cover image of Apollo Remastered, a new book of restored images from the Nasa archive, shows Commander Jim McDivitt looking up on Apollo 9 in 1969. I think a lot of people read awe and wonder in his face, but I see immense concentration. It is the most intense 90 seconds of your life when you use a robotic arm to grab another car. You have a say in everything.

I can see the awe and wonder in a picture of NeilArmstrong after his moon walk. His face says, "Oh my God, what have we just done?" as he returns to the capsule. He looks like he is having a hard time processing it. There are a lot of posed pictures of him but his smile is genuine. Imagine being one of the first humans to travel to another planet. There is a tear in his eye

Humans had walked on the moon when I was born. My mother and I watched all the space shuttle launches. I remember seeing pictures of the two men on the moon. Apollo 11 opened my eyes to the possibilities that we could do.

I remember what it was like to be in space when I look at these images. The light should be taken. There is no white like that on the planet. It comes through the window and strikes the astronauts. There is a picture of Commander Schirra on Apollo 7 and it is the lightest light you will ever see. The sun's light is the lightest in the universe. Earth's atmosphere makes it look like that.

The clarity with which you can see in space is amazing because there is no atmospheric haze. It makes judging distances difficult. In the famous picture of the man on the moon, the first thing that comes to mind is his suit. If you look at his visor, you can see the flag and the moon landing. There is no dust. The shadow is sharper because there is no light scattering.

This is what led to a lot of conspiracy theories. People thought it was the light they got in the studio. You don't get that outside on Earth. That is what makes these pictures authentic. I relate to this. This is not confined to one place.

Being launched into space is dangerous. As you get up to 25 times the speed of sound, you use a lot of energy. You know you are entering a different realm. It is an experience of complete tranquility when the engines stop. You think, "Oh wow, we've made it." As you travel through space, you can see Earth from a different perspective.

Earthrise is a famous photograph. It would have been possible for the Apollo 8 crew to see Earth as they popped out from behind the moon, with the north pole at the top. We all know the orientation in the book.

Earth is unlike any other planet we've seen. You just know that there is a planet teeming with life. It is beautiful and fragile against that black background.

I remember how Earth looks from space when I look at static images of the planet. It changes every single time. We did over 3000 laps. Europe becomes a wash of yellow in the spring when the rapeseed is in bloom. It can be muddy in the winter. There are a lot of storms at night.

We would always call each other over to see some things. There is an eruption of volcanic activity. We would fly through Auroras if we were on the space station. There was a bloom in the Black Sea. There are a couple of big icebergs.

The space station is a busy place, with all the radios and cameras on, and a lot of people on it. I would switch off the lights the last time. When I was brushing my teeth, I would go to the cupola window and look out at the world. It was great to have that view at night.

The pictures of the astronauts in the capsule make me happy. We have to seal ourselves in these structures in order to survive out there, which is why they are called claustrophobic.

I felt a sense of joy when the hatch opened. The two of us were in the airlock after six hours in our space suits. After opening the hatch, we went down the vacuum.

I believe the Apollo 11 crew would have felt that way too. After all the deaths the space programme had suffered, suddenly there was a moment where they could just walk on the moon. I am sure they were saying, "We've done it." We are as in humanity.

It was forced upon us to just float in space because we had to wait for the sun to set on our spacewalk. The experience was so freeing. You look down on Earth, then you flip on your back and look up at the stars. You have no forces on your body. You are aware of the danger and isolation and feel a huge exposure.

In the early spacewalk photos, you can see how they had a cord that kept them attached to the craft. It makes them seem lost. They swim in space. You can't see that anymore. We use a four-foot strap to hold on to things.

I try to keep things in perspective, but when I go into space, I think about mortality and spirituality a lot. On my spacewalk, I thought about how small we are and how insignificant we are. Our body is made out of different elements that have been put together in a certain order, and every single one of them was forged in the universe. We need a position where we can form complex intelligent thoughts about who we are and where we come from in order to understand that. It makes you believe that we are the consciousness of the universe. Being up there in space or looking at the pictures allows you to think about that.

The photo Charlie Duke left behind on the moon is one of the most moving images I've ever seen. He wrote the name of the family on the back. Landed on the moon. It was like: "Yes, but don't forget we are human" when they saw this. As told to her by the person.

The original photographic film from the Apollo missions is one of the most important in the world. It is stored in a freezer at the Johnson Space Center. It doesn't leave the freezer often. The most significant moments in our history are included in the images.

As the original film lay in its frozen vault for half a century, almost all the Apollo images made publicly available have been copies of master duplicate, or copies of copies, which has only accelerated with the prevalence of digital representations of these images online.

The original film has been removed, thawed, cleaned and scanned in the last few years. Most of the 35,000 photographs are rarely seen because of the quality of the original film. It is easy to forget that they were taken in an era when photography was purely analogue. New, high-resolution scans of the original film were painstakingly restored using image-enhancement technology. They offer a mixture of the pre-digital 1960s era and the current day. The quality of the equipment used and the technical prowess in their taking made the images so crisp that they border on the absurd.

We can gain an understanding of the endeavor and imagine ourselves on the journey. To see the hostile environment before you open the hatch. As we stand on the edge of huge craters and rilles, we can see the grandeur and scale of this alien world. NeilArmstrong and his fellow space explorers peer through their cameras as they descend the ladder.

AndySaunders has a social media account.