space

A short SpaceX video of the Dragon 2 pad abort test, in which the capsule's thrusters fire to carry it away from the launch pad. It also shows the pad deluge system.

Scott Manley tries a Space Shuttle Return To Launch Site abort in the Orbiter simulator without manuals or checklists. He explains how the maneuver works and where his attempt went wrong.

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 four-pane view of Armadillo Aerospace's Mod vehicle on a June 2010 boosted hop. The flight includes engine shutdown, drogue chute deployment, an engine restart and a safe landing.

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

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 short visualization from HotNets researchers of routing and latency over SpaceX's proposed Starlink constellation, based on its FCC filings. It shows orbital shells, link topology and how inter-satellite routes could beat terrestrial fiber on long distances.

A two-minute clip recorded on a Kennedy Space Center tour showing a Space Shuttle thermal tile that can be held by hand while its surface is extremely hot. It demonstrates the tile's remarkable insulating properties.

Helmet-camera footage of linemen installing a spacer on an energized 765,000 volt transmission line, working from a helicopter. The crew bonds on and off the live wire as part of the job.

A short test firing of the XRS-2200 linear aerospike engine at NASA Stennis Space Center, which was designed for the cancelled X-33 VentureStar. The engine is shown at roughly 80 percent of max thrust.

Lyle Bickley of the PDP-1 restoration team tours the 1959 DEC machine at the Computer History Museum and plays the original Spacewar! He covers its graphics display and the MIT student programs written for it.

Mark Rober and Joe Barnard drop an egg from a high-altitude balloon, using a camera-guided glider to steer it to a safe landing.

A review of the Symbolics Space Cadet keyboard, with its Honeywell Hall effect switches, including how it sounds and feels, and a typing demonstration. It is part of a series of vintage keyboard reviews.

A recapture in 50fps HD of Spaceballs' 'State of the Art', an Amiga demo released at The Party 1992. It showcases the Amiga's real-time animation, graphics and music in a few minutes.

Spaceballs' 9 Fingers, an Amiga demoscene demo released at The Party in 1993, recaptured here in 50fps HD. It is the follow-up to their demo State of the Art.

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

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.

Footage from a camera on a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster from liftoff through descent, with audio enhanced by Skywalker Sound from the original camera microphones. The sound is real, not foley.

Sped-up onboard camera footage of the Falcon 9 first stage landing on a drone ship during the THAICOM 8 mission on May 27, 2016. It shows the descent from grid fin deployment to touchdown.

Declassified footage of 1950s tests of Project Orion, the nuclear pulse propulsion concept, including the Hot Rod prototypes flown on conventional high explosives. It shows the pusher-plate idea working in small scale.

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.

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.

Scott Manley uses a realistically scaled Kerbal Space Program setup to show why dropping something into the Sun is far harder than it sounds. It demonstrates the need to cancel orbital velocity.

A short MIT Aerospace Controls Lab demo from 2011 of a variable pitch quadrotor flying.

A NASA Langley concept video for HAVOC, a lighter-than-air vehicle that would carry two astronauts on a 30-day mission in Venus's upper atmosphere. It explains why the planet's surface is so hostile and why the clouds are more habitable.

Footage of an unmanned Apollo boilerplate capsule launched on a Little Joe II booster to test the launch escape system. The booster went out of control and broke up, but the escape system worked and the capsule was recovered undamaged.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

An animated Gabbard diagram of objects in low Earth orbit from 1959 to 2021, showing altitude over time. It highlights major debris-generating events and how low-altitude debris decays out of orbit.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.

Cockpit footage of a Swiss Airbus A340 crew dealing with rising oil temperature in one engine on a Zurich to Shanghai flight, ending with a safety landing. It shows the pilots' procedures through the emergency.

A hands-on comparison of how jet fuel, diesel, heating oil, kerosene, avgas and gasoline burn and what color they are. It shows that gasoline ignites more easily than jet fuel.

A short video of a Boeing 777 wing being tested to destruction, finally breaking at 154 percent of its designed limit load. The wing is flexed upward until it fails.

Raw 500 fps footage from Camera E-8 on the launch tower for the Apollo 11 Saturn V liftoff, transferred in HD from the 16mm original. More than eight minutes of film covers about 30 seconds of real time.

Mentour Pilot, a 737 captain, demonstrates in a full flight simulator why a Boeing 737 can become impossible to trim manually at high speed. He explains the jackscrew forces and the roller-coaster manoeuvre.

A short compilation of aircraft flying through clouds and moist air, showing the spiraling vortices that wings leave behind. The footage shows wingtip vortices and the way planes disturb cloud layers.

Smarter Every Day host Destin Sandlin tries to hover a helicopter and finds it very hard. The video shows how the constant coordinated corrections across several control axes feel at first and how learning makes them automatic.

Footage of FAA altitude chamber hypoxia training for pilots in which a participant passes out from oxygen deprivation. It shows how quickly and subtly cognition fails at altitude.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a Kollsman MD-1 Automatic Astro Compass, a mechanical analog computer from a B-52 bomber. It is part of a star-tracker inertial navigation system that computes altitude and azimuth.