rockets

A Veritasium video touring Relativity Space and explaining why 3D printing whole rockets cuts tooling costs, allows rapid iteration, reduces part count and enables new designs. It includes an interview with Scott Manley on aerospace engineering.

Curious Droid surveys vertical take-off and landing rockets that predate SpaceX and Blue Origin, including the McDonnell Douglas DC-X of the 1990s. It shows that propulsive landing has about 60 years of history.

Destin Sandlin tours United Launch Alliance's rocket factory with CEO Tory Bruno, showing friction stir welding, structural rocket skins and large milled parts.

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.

Scott Manley looks at SpinLaunch, which aims to throw launch vehicles out of a spinning launcher at hypersonic speed. He covers its recent Mach 1 test of a one-third scale launcher and the engineering problems that remain.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper vehicle's 744 m test hop, filmed from a hexacopter that gets closer than earlier flights. Grasshopper was a vertical takeoff and landing rig built to test returning rockets to the pad.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper vertical takeoff and landing test vehicle making its first roughly 6-foot hop in McGregor, Texas, on September 21, 2012. It was an early step toward a reusable Falcon 9 first stage.

SpaceX's September 2019 Starship update presentation, where Elon Musk describes the design and development of Starship and Super Heavy. It covers construction and plans for reusable orbital rockets.

Footage of DC-X Flight 8 from July 1995 at White Sands, in which the Delta Clipper Experimental reusable rocket turned over into a re-entry profile and re-oriented itself for landing.

Sal Khan interviews Elon Musk in a 2013 Khan Academy entrepreneurship series. Musk discusses PayPal, rocket efficiency and reusability, and how he approaches education and learning.

SpaceX's recap of the Falcon Heavy debut launch, with side booster landings and a Tesla Roadster with Starman sent into orbit.

Joe Barnard of BPS.space shows his model rocket Scout F landing vertically like a SpaceX booster after seven years of attempts. The video documents the successful landing and the build-up to it.

A SpaceX concept animation showing the planned fully reusable Falcon 9, with both first and second stages performing vertical landings.

Thunderf00t's critique of SpaceX's claims, arguing its launches are not actually cheaper than competitors or the Space Shuttle. It questions the economics of reusability.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper reusable rocket prototype flying 325 m before landing on its pad. It was the first test to use the full navigation sensor suite and closed-loop control for a precision landing.

A SpaceX concept animation of a Falcon 9 and Dragon launch with powered vertical return of both stages and the capsule. It was uploaded to YouTube in 2011.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

NASASpaceflight's 24/7 live stream from SpaceX's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, showing Starship and Super Heavy development, testing and launches.

Thunderf00t's second video critiquing SpinLaunch, the company that proposes flinging rockets and payloads into space with a giant centrifuge. He argues the idea is physically unworkable.

Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

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.

SpaceX's livestream of the Falcon Heavy test flight, including the launch, side booster landings and Tesla Roadster payload. It was the first launch of the most powerful operational rocket at the time.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut tours SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. They cover the high bay, grid fins, Raptor V2, the HLS lander and stage separation, and Musk explains his engineering management process.

Carl Sagan's narration of the Pale Blue Dot passage, reflecting on the Voyager photograph of Earth as a tiny speck in space. It is a short meditation on humanity's smallness and shared home.

The first episode of CuriousMarc's series restoring a real Apollo Guidance Computer, led by AGC expert Mike Stewart. They set up a makeshift lab in a Houston hotel room to open up a rare machine owned by a private collector.

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.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

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.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

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.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

Kurzgesagt explains how accumulating space junk could trigger a collision cascade (Kessler syndrome) that makes launches too dangerous and traps humanity on Earth.

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.

Everyday Astronaut explains the basic physics of rocket engines, the main engine cycles and fuel types, then compares SpaceX's methane-fueled full-flow staged combustion Raptor to other engines. It runs nearly 50 minutes with chapter markers.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.