The collection of 4,500 pictures, to be sold at an auction in Vienna, is the largest on the subject ever offered on the open market.
It features shots from the days when rockets were little more than guided missiles, adapted to carry a passenger or two instead of a warhead, through to the sudden sunset of manned moonshots in the 1970s, the 'Guardian' reported.
The photographs, amassed by a European collector, are to be sold in just two large lots and have an estimate value of 320,000-480,000 pounds.
The images shed fresh light on the extraordinary period of technological advance and human achievement that sprang from the struggle between the US and the former Soviet Union.
The collection includes familiar pictures, such as a colour shot of Buzz Aldrin alone on the lunar surface, which became one of the world's most reproduced photographs.
It also contains hundreds of black-and-white documentary shots of astronauts and technicians, which reveal the fatigue, boredom and fear that was the true face of the space race.
The space race was eventually won by the Apollo 11 mission of July 1969, witnessed by a television audience of around half a billion entranced by blurred, black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong, who died in August, taking a giant leap for mankind.
