Search - NASA: 50 Years of Space Exploration! on DVD

Interesting content but mediocre video quality

Flavio Ribeiro | Sao Paulo, SP BRAZIL | 11/07/2004

(3 out of 5 stars)

"While this set presents plenty of very interesting NASA produced documentaries, its image quality leaves much to be desired. It is understandable that most videos are more than 30 years old, so one can't expect DV like resolutions. However, the image quality in the first 4 discs is at best comparable to a typical VHS tape.

The 5th disc -- which covers the ISS and recent shuttle flights such as John Glenn's and Columbia's disaster -- has better video, but it's still similar to a PAL video broadcast. So while the content is unique to DVD series, be aware that the transfer leaves much to be desired. If you're hoping to find high resolution footage of the space vehicles in all their glory (as I was), this shortcoming may be quite disappointing.

As an unrelated note, my set had no region encoding. This is reasonable since NASA material is released to the public domain and shouldn't be published in a restricted format."

Perfect for NASA buffs.

B.J. Carroll | DeFuniak Springs, FL. | 02/14/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have always been amazed by NASA and all of the moon landings and the space shuttles. This set is all a NASA fan could hope for. It goes into great detail on things like the Challenger disaster, Moon landings, the space shuttles and the Hubble telescope. I bought it thinking that it would be like the Discovery Channel shows but there is more to it. The 5 discs run a little over 11 hours long total. It includes some stuff about the Columbia disaster. It does a thing on the crew members and the shuttle itself. The only thing I did not like was it did not go in detail of the shuttle coming apart. It did not show it happening or did it explain what caused it to happen it just talked about it and showed what the crew did during the mission. The Challenger was given almost an hour on its disaster which was worth the 28 dollars by itself. Over all very interesting and informative. If your a Space and NASA kind of person you can not go wrong with this set."

A bit of a disapointment

M. J. Rodriguez | 04/24/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"We bought this set thinking we were in for some educational and informative entertainment. Not! We are NASA Buffs and we're let down by the ending. We followed every step of the Columbia, from take off to it's sad disater when it actually took place. But this DVD does not even explain ANY details of what happened to our heros. It covers their lives and how they gave their lives for mankind, but not anything about the disater. We didn't expect to see anything gruesome, but we wanted to know more about our lost astronauts. And it only spent about 5 minutes on the unfortunate fire onboard the Apollo 12. Such a let down."