A Winning Design • 2008 • episode "S1E1" • The Life of Mammals

95:57

When Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan stepped on the Moon in December 1972 he left his footprints and his daughter's initials in the lunar dust. Only now, over forty years later, is he ready to share his epic but deeply personal story of fulfillment, love and loss. Cernan's burning ambition carried him from a quiet Chicago suburb to the spectacular and hazardous environment of space, and ultimately, to the Moon. Five years in the making, The Last Man on the Moon unveils a wealth of rare archive material, and takes Cernan back to the launch pads of Cape Kennedy, to Arlington National Cemetery and to his Texas ranch, where he finds respite from a past that refuses to let him go.

2014 • Astronomy

88:55

Professor Brian Cox fulfils a childhood dream by going behind the scenes at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), mission control for Mars 2020 – one of the most ambitious missions ever launched that may finally reveal if life ever existed on the red planet. In 1980, a young Brian Cox wrote to JPL asking for photos from some of their missions to the planets. The pictures they sent him from Voyager and the Viking mission to Mars were a source of inspiration that set him on the path to becoming a physicist. Now, over 40 years later, he has been granted privileged access to JPL, including key mission areas that are usually off-limits to film crews. Brian spends a week following the team who guide the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter - the first powered aircraft ever sent to another planet - across the surface of Mars during a critical stage of the mission. Perseverance's goal is to search for signs of long extinct life on the surface of Mars in an area called Jezero Crater, which, 3.8 billion years ago, was filled by a vast lake. If it finds evidence of that life, it could change everything we know about life in the universe - and even transform our understanding of our own origins.

2022 • Astronomy

89:08

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. But that history is bunk. The real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts. This documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age. A particular highlight is Alexei Leonov, the man who performed the first spacewalk, explaining how he found himself trapped outside his spacecraft 500 miles above the Earth.

2014 • Astronomy

42:00

The universe is a dangerous place, and we explore the deadliest spots in the cosmos. Between earth and the edge of the universe, there are a million ways to die, and our crash test dummy is on a mission to reveal the worst.

S5E6 • How the Universe Works • 2017 • Astronomy

50:51

Look up at the night sky, and you see countless shining stars. Our galaxy has 100 billion of them. Astronomers are now hunting for clues that will reveal "the first star" that transformed the ancient universe and led to the creation of everything that followed: galaxies, planets and life itself.

6 • Cosmic Front • 2014 • Astronomy

4:42

Our species has discovered a way to communicate through the dark, to transcend immense distances

5/10 • The Sagan Series • 1989 • Astronomy