Organising images of futures-past: remembering the Apollo moon landings

Organisational memory studies (OMS) has begun to consider the ways in which organisations construct versions of their own history. These histories have a broader significance through the ways they resource and are contested within cultural memory. In this paper we discuss the way that the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) constituted both its own past and future significance through the remediation and premediation of key images of the Apollo space programme. Drawing on visitor feedback from an exhibition in the National Space Centre in the UK, we identify three distinct narratives through which personal recollections of the Apollo landings are given espoused historical significance - 'my generation', 'watching the landings' and 'remembering the future'. The images of the Apollo landings are a site of contestation where nostalgia for the supposed future that NASA sought to premediate is mixed with acknowledgement of the failure of that future to materialise.