Apollo Theory

A major component of this article or section is speculation.
The ideas and connections made here have not been confirmed by any official source.

One element of the Portal Puzzle has a link to a NASA genome project, namely Apollo.

Two dinosaur images were taken from Cargo Cult/Adam Foster's flickr profile and one was determined to be old Apollo/NASA technology.
"Eclipse image" could be reference to Greek god Apollo of light & Sun, or a reference to the sunburst-colored Vox Apollo VI/V266 guitar/IV basses, or a reference to "The Sounds of Earth" cover.
Some ASCII is possibly an image of rockets.
- Dino26
SSTV, the same technology used to encode the dinosaur images as sound, was used in the Apollo mission to transmit video from space and the moon.
In the GDC acceptance speech Gabe Newell refers to "decode satellite data". However it should be noted that this link is incredibly weak to the Apollo missions specifically. Regardless, it does reflect an overall 'space' theme which should perhaps be explored further.
Another interesting nugget is that the can-collecting robot, Herbert, is from MIT. Some of Herbert's wiring appeared on an SSTV image. Coincedently, MIT had an exhibition on the Apollo mission earlier this year.