In 1994 or so NASA considered to buy a new set of cameras for the Shuttle fleet, a couple of some hundred. At that time one was not very pleased with the performance of the Hasselblads because lack of a a sophisticated metering system. The Rollei 6000 series was seriously considered to be bought by Nasa. However, the contacts to the US representatives of Rollei were not really helpfull at that time (as it was reported from Nasa to me).
I mediated negotiations between Nasa and Rollei Germany, which lead to a visit of the Nasa camera representative (who was a German native US American who was very positive to German products) at Rollei in Braunschweig where he was very impressed about the 6000 system.
However, Nasa required to have a back for a long roll of film for the camera. Rollei had one in the programme, which was an adopted Mamiya back. However, this had a lot of flaws, and Nasa required to remove all the shortcomings and after that they would be very pleased to place an order of a large lot. Unfortunately the management of Rollei was completely unaware about the chance this camera delivery to Nasa could achieve; so they did not continue negotiations to come out with a reasonable offer to Nasa. And further on, after having had Nasa visiting Rollei on my intervention, Rollei management did not feel responsible to inform me on the outcome of the visit (which could have helped to mediate further negotiations).
A couple of years later Mr. Sass, Rollei CEO, approached me again on this issue. He had heard about the failure of the older management to respond adequately and wanted to restart negotiation with Nasa. However, at that time it was too late. Nasa already hat invested in a large new lot of Hasselblads.
And the next lot after that became digital..... This is a stoty of a missed opportunity due to decision by management. Best regards Dirk At 14:53 27.10.2009, you wrote:
At 09:39 AM 10/27/2009, John Wild wrote: >I had read somewhere that one of the astronauts (cannot remember which >one off hand), when NASA realized that they did not have a suitable >camera for the pending mission, popped out to the local store and bought >a Hasselblad 500... It was Alan Sheppard and a Yashica. Marc msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir! --- Rollei List - Post to rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx- Subscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'subscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org- Unsubscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org- Online, searchable archives are available at //www.freelists.org/archives/rollei_list
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