mars mission

A documentary following Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society as they push the Mars Direct plan for sending humans to Mars using current technology and local resources. It also covers the clash with NASA's more expensive approach.

A short clip of Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, answering why humanity should go to Mars. He argues that societies grow by challenging themselves and that exploration inspires young people.

Veritasium's Derek Muller visits NASA JPL to see the Mars helicopter Ingenuity before it was mounted on the rover. He explains how it can fly in Mars's thin atmosphere with large, fast-spinning contra-rotating rotors and low mass, and covers power and cold.

Isaac Arthur's in-depth look at what it would take to settle and eventually terraform Mars. He covers the challenges and the scale of the work needed to make it a home for humanity.

A Kurzgesagt animation walking through how a Mars base could be built and why it would be punishing, covering radiation, temperature extremes, toxic dust and the need for shielding.

NASA's animated explanation of the Curiosity rover's Mars landing, which relied on a complex automated sequence taking about seven minutes. It features NASA engineers discussing the risks before the 2012 landing.

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether Venus would be a better colonization target than Mars. It covers Venus's habitable altitudes, floating balloon habitats, and the term surfacism.

A 1968 NASA film from the US National Archives explaining why the US needed a nuclear rocket and how the engine works. It also shows combined nuclear and chemical stages for a manned Mars mission.

A 1936 Chevrolet-sponsored film that explains how a car transmission works by treating gears as spinning levers. It uses physical models to make the mechanism clear.

Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.

Elon Musk's 2016 IAC presentation on the technical challenges and architectures for building a self-sustaining human presence on Mars.

Lex Fridman's long conversation with Elon Musk covering SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot and self-driving, robotics and AI.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg interview Elon Musk at Code Conference 2016 about one-way Mars missions, electric vehicles, autonomous cars, SpaceX booster reuse and AI.

A roughly three-hour San Francisco workshop by Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication, with full English subtitles added by a fan. He teaches the model with his jackal and giraffe language examples.

Roman Mars gives a funny TED talk on vexillology, laying out five basic principles of good flag design and why many city flags fail them.

Engineering Explained compares the lifecycle emissions of keeping an old car with those of buying a new, more efficient one. It weighs manufacturing emissions against emissions from driving, and covers gas versus electric cars.

Engineering Explained compares the lifetime CO2 emissions of a Toyota RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid with a Tesla Model Y, looking at break-even mileage and whether electric cars are worse for the environment.

SpaceX engineers present at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference on a multi-physics code that simulates the full-scale Raptor methane engine. It covers GPU-based turbulent combustion modeling with adaptive grids and wavelet compression.

Full recording of Elon Musk's January 2015 presentation and Q&A at the SpaceX Seattle office announcement. He lays out plans for a satellite constellation to provide low-latency global internet, tied to funding Mars ambitions. Pauses between questions have been edited out.

Kurzgesagt explains the skyhook, a rotating cable with a counterweight that could catapult spacecraft from Earth orbit toward deep space. It covers why it would make space travel cheaper and more efficient.

Geoff Marshall explains a running gag about London Underground stair signs claiming that the climb equals 15 floors, regardless of how many steps there actually are.

Engineering Explained works through whether electric cars are really worse for the environment than gasoline cars. It covers battery production emissions, the electricity mix used to charge, and how long an EV takes to break even on lifetime emissions.

Real Engineering looks at why Africa's abundant solar potential is hard to turn into usable power, especially for Europe. It covers the transmission, infrastructure and economic obstacles, and the pivot from concentrated solar to photovoltaics.

Engineering Explained examines new research suggesting corn ethanol in US gasoline may emit as much or more carbon than gasoline. It covers the Renewable Fuel Standard and why ethanol was assumed to be a green fuel.

Weird Al's whiteboard-animated music video parodying corporate buzzword culture, from the album Mandatory Fun. The lyrics are packed with business jargon.

A short animated explanation of the power split device in Toyota-style hybrids, a planetary gearset that works as an eCVT. It shows how engine and motor power are combined.

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel about technological stagnation, AI, longevity, space travel and politics. Thiel also lays out his framing of the Antichrist as a risk of civilizational stagnation.

Fraser Cain interviews JPL physicist Slava Turyshev about using the Sun's gravity as a lens to image distant exoplanets. They cover how the lens works, how a spacecraft would align with it, and mission design.

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

Trailer for the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight, shown at the Boston SciFi Film Festival. The film follows the engineers who keep the Voyager spacecraft running.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

Kurzgesagt examines who is responsible for climate change, comparing historical, current and per-capita emissions by country. It argues that individual footprints are a distraction from larger responsibility.

A one-minute capture of Tim Clarke's 1993 'Mars' DOS demo, a roughly 5 KB program that renders a navigable terrain landscape in real time.

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.

An excerpt of a C-SPAN interview in which Thomas Sowell argues that preferential admission policies produce mismatch, dropouts and resentment.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

Michael Steil and Christian Hessmann's 34C3 talk explaining the Apollo Guidance Computer end to end: hardware design, operating system, and mission software.

Isaac Arthur explains the orbital ring, a megastructure launch-assist system that could move bulk cargo cheaply to orbit and beyond. He compares it with space elevators and discusses power transmission.

Kurzgesagt lays out a speculative plan to terraform Venus, covering its hostile atmosphere and how it might be made Earth-like, with a sources page linked.