The complex engineering challenges that make re-entry into the earth's atmosphere so dangerous. Scientists have labored for years to bring a crew safely home in what is essentially a meteorite, wrapped in a cocoon of fire, hurtling towards earth six times faster than the fastest bullet. Scientific experts from NASA explain the significance of Columbia's events as they unfolded, offer insights into what may have caused them and how those key events contributed to the shuttle’s ultimate destruction.


The complex engineering challenges that make re-entry into the earth's atmosphere so dangerous. Scientists have labored for years to bring a crew safely home in what is essentially a meteorite, wrapped in a cocoon of fire, hurtling towards earth six times faster than the fastest bullet. Scientific experts from NASA explain the significance of Columbia's events as they unfolded, offer insights into what may have caused them and how those key events contributed to the shuttle’s ultimate destruction.
2003-06-25
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6.7An epic journey around Mars — built from real satellite and rover data — revealing the red planet as you’ve never seen it before.
7.3A new age of space exploration, and exploitation, is dawning. But surprisingly, some of the boldest efforts at putting humans into space are now those of private companies started by a handful of maverick billionaire businessmen. Beyond mass space travel, and even space mining and manufacturing, the dream of Elon Musk and others is true space exploration. His company, SpaceX, already delivers supplies to the International Space Station, and their next step is delivering astronauts too. But their true ambition is to ensure the survival of the human race by crossing our solar system and colonizing Mars in the next decade. Could commercial spaceflight companies eventually make us a space-faring civilization?
7.4At the dawn of the Space Race, seven test pilots set out to become the first American astronauts to enter space. However, the road to making history brings momentous challenges.
Comets pose one of the greatest threats to life on Earth - a threat that can only be countered if we find out more about them. In 2005, in an audacious bid to do just that, NASA scientists launched a space probe to collide with a comet in the emptiness of deep space. This film follows the amazing story of mission Deep Impact, from its inception through to the final nail-biting moments when the probe and comet Tempel 1 met head-on.
0.0This feature-length documentary is a portrait of eclipse chasers, people for whom solar eclipses - among nature's more spectacular phenomena – are a veritable obsession. The film follows 4 of them as they travel incredible distances to witness the last total eclipse of the millennium as it sweeps eastward across Europe to India. At various points along the way enthusiasts Alain Cirou in France, Paul Houde in Austria, Olivier Staiger in Germany and Debasis Sarkar in India offer their impressions of the historic event.
6.5NASA's biggest spacecraft, Cassini, plunges into Saturn in the final act of a 20-year mission showcasing the planet like never before. An incredible first full look at the Saturn mission with a spotlight on the team that dreamed to explore the planet deeper than ever before.
4.0National Geographic and NASA are sending you into space - live! For the first time ever, board the International Space Station and take a complete orbit of Earth in real time.
7.1The Academy Award® nominee Cosmic Voyage combines live action with state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery to pinpoint where humans fit in our ever-expanding universe. Highlighting this journey is a "cosmic zoom" based on the powers of 10, extending from the Earth to the largest observable structures in the universe, and then back to the subnuclear realm.
7.6Archival material from the original NASA film footage – much of it seen for the first time – plus interviews with the surviving astronauts, including Jim Lovell, Dave Scott, John Young, Gene Cernan, Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Edgar Mitchell, Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmitt.
7.5Move over, King Tut: There's a new pharaoh on the scene. A team of top archaeologists and forensics experts revisits the story of Hatshepsut, the woman who snatched the throne dressed as a man and declared herself ruler. Despite her long and prosperous reign, her record was all but eradicated from Egyptian history in a mystery that has long puzzled scholars. But with the latest research effort captured in this program, history is about to change.
8.2With access to the scientists and engineers responsible for the Curiosity rover's on-the-ground experiments, NOVA captures its landing on Mars
0.0The Space Race comes alive through the eyes of the ultimate insider - retired NASA Mission Control Flight Director Gene Kranz. A history of the U.S. manned space program from Mercury to Apollo 17, as seen by the men of Mission Control.
7.5The true story of technical troubles that scuttle the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, risking the lives of astronaut Jim Lovell and his crew, with the failed journey turning into a thrilling saga of heroism. Drifting more than 200,000 miles from Earth, the astronauts work furiously with the ground crew to avert tragedy.
0.0Moonscape is a free and freely downloadable high-definition documentary about the first manned Moon landing. Funded and produced by space enthusiasts from all over the world, it shows the full, unedited Apollo 11 landing and moonwalk, using only the original TV and film footage and the original audio and photographs. All this material has been scanned, digitized and restored from the best available sources. The live TV broadcast, the 16mm color film footage shot on the Moon and in Mission Control, and the Hasselblad 70mm color photographs taken by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, have been fully synchronized with the audio recordings (including the onboard and Mission Control recordings) and are presented in real time, as they happened, with full subtitles in English or Italian.
7.0Spacecraft OSIRIS-REx attempts to grab a piece of an asteroid to bring back to Earth so scientists can study it to learn about the planet's origins.
8.5It was November 12, 2014, at 5:03pm. Humanity had just accomplished a feat that will forever mark its history. Philae, the miniature laboratory integrated into the Rosetta probe, landed softly on comet 67P Chourioumov-Guérassimenko, better known as Tchouri. The culmination of a project decided twenty-one years earlier, in 1993, by the European Space Agency - the first to display the immense ambition of landing on one of these bodies made of ice and dust, archives of the solar system's infancy. To achieve this, it took years of preparation, a decade-long flight, six billion kilometers flown, thousands of scientists and engineers involved... Astrophysicist Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd sums it all up: "From this mission, we hope - and can reasonably expect - to understand the origin of the solar system and how life appeared on Earth.
7.0The film features amazing scenes of places never before seen gathered by key space missions that culminated with groundbreaking discoveries in 2015. It features a spectacular flight though the great cliffs on comet 67P, a close look at the fascinating bright "lights" on Ceres, and the first ever close ups of dwarf binary planet Pluto/Charon and its moons.
0.0On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51-L ended in tragedy when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. On board was physicist Ronald E. McNair, the second African American to enter space. But first, he was a kid with big dreams in Lake City, South Carolina.
6.4Some 220 miles above Earth lies the International Space Station, a one-of-a-kind outer space laboratory that 16 nations came together to build. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this extraordinary structure in this spectacular IMAX film. Viewers will blast off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russia for this incredible journey -- IMAX's first-ever space film. Tom Cruise narrates.
7.2Join the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity for an awe-inspiring journey to the surface of the mysterious red planet.