I was no longer interested in space until about five years ago, when I started checking out the NASA archives. This is a public archive. If you go and get the actual image number of a photograph, NASA will make a print for a nominal fee. But what you'll get is a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate. What I did was negotiate with NASA for about nine months to get access to their masters, which are one generation away from the originals.
Nobody touches the originals.
They're in frozen storage in the ground. A regular camera. A hand-held Hasselblad on the moon. After I got the masters off-site, I digitally scanned them. I didn't duplicate them as much as clone them.