NASA - 50 Years of Space Exploration (5-Disc DVD Boxset)

This is a 5 DVD compilation of official NASA films, concentrating very heavily on manned spaceflight. The first half of the story concentrates on contemporary documentaries on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab; the second half the Space Shuttle missions, including detailed discussion of the Challenger disaster and its aftermath, and the Columbia re-entry disaster. The earlier films show much rare footage from Gemini and Mercury missions; most of the official films of the later Apollo missions are included. The real space footage is uniformly stunning - the quality of transfer and the resolution of the original images may not always be too hot by modern standards (remember, we're talking about 40-year-old prints and primitive electronics!), but what we're seeing here is grippingly real. These films aren't the definitive history of manned spaceflight (on the first disc, for example, there is no acknowledgement that the Russians were first into space) - but they are an excellent tribute to the brave men and women who have pushed the boundaries and to the engineers and scientists who have built their craft.