NASA archival footage

Screengrab via NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center/YouTube

NASA has put hundreds of the coolest testing videos you can imagine on YouTube

Watch footage from the 1940s to the present day.

 

Josh Katzowitz

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Posted on Jul 23, 2017   Updated on May 22, 2021, 11:02 pm CDT

If you ever wanted to have easy access to watch a jet go Mach 10 or view 1960s film footage of a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle lifting off, NASA has a treat for you.

For the past several days, the space agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center has posted on YouTube hundreds of unearthed video clips of various flight tests, rocket launches, Mars Rovers, and other just plain cool stuff for anybody who’s fascinated by space and the journey to get there.

The center reportedly selected 500 videos that it would migrate from a little-used corner of the internet on the Dryden Flight Research Center website to YouTube. NASA Armstrong is doing so because it wants fans to have easier access to some of its archived history.

“NASA has so much digital content that tends to be overlooked by the public, given the difficulty that exists in actually locating the content,” Rebecca Richardson, social media manager for NASA Armstrong, told Motherboard. “Our hope is that by moving the content to more accessible platforms, NASA fans and media personnel will be able to access the content more regularly and become more fully immersed in what is happening at NASA.”

Here are some of the coolest videos we found so far.

This is a test flight from the mid-1960s of a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle over California’s Mojave Desert.

This is a 2003 video from the Mojave Desert when researchers were testing the Mars Exploration Rover.

This 1969 film shows a Hyper III drop test from an SH-3 helicopter.

This video displays the inflight footage as an F-16D jet tests the Automatic Collision Avoidance Technology project.

Here’s a 66-second clip from the mid-1940s that shows the unloading and reassembly of a D-558 Skystreak, a plane that broke a world record four months later by flying at 640.74 mph.

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And finally, if you like explosions, here’s a video montage of a Controlled Impact Demonstration from 1984.

H/T Motherboard

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*First Published: Jul 23, 2017, 10:48 am CDT