spaceflight

In her final days as ISS commander, Sunita Williams gives an extensive tour of the station's modules and research facilities, narrating the work done aboard.

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.

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.

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

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 very long, detailed look at the A4/V2 rocket turbopump, the steam-turbine-driven twin propellant pump system. It covers the peroxide and permanganate catalysis that drives the turbine. This is part 1 of a series on V2 components.

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 1966 NASA safety film teaching workers how to handle toxic rocket propellants such as hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. It explains the hazards of these corrosive, flammable and toxic chemicals and what to do after contamination.

CuriousMarc's Apollo Guidance Computer restoration series looks at core rope memory, the ROM that held the Moon landing programs. Mike Stewart builds a custom reader to recover lost AGC programs.

Urban explorers break into the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to film the abandoned Soviet Buran space shuttles. The video shows the decaying orbiters and the dangerous trip to reach them.

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.

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.

A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine. It covers the history from HOTOL and the heat-exchanger breakthrough.

NASA Goddard recreates the Apollo 8 Earthrise moment using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, narrated by Andrew Chaikin and synced with the astronauts' recorded conversation. It marks the flight's 45th anniversary.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

A NASA video on the 29 days after the James Webb Space Telescope's launch, when thousands of parts must deploy in sequence on the way to its destination a million miles away.