GO / NO-GO

Every mission comes down to one decision, and somebody has to make it.

Go/No-Go tells the stories behind the calls that decided spaceflight: the sensor that was built in backwards, the O-ring meeting the night before Challenger, the unit conversion that lost a Mars probe, the launch that went ahead in the cold, and the ones that were called off in time. Each episode follows one mission from the drawing board to the moment the decision came due, with the engineering explained plainly and the people named.

All footage and images come from NASA, the National Archives and Wikimedia Commons, public domain, re-edited with our own narration. Sources are listed under every video.

New episode every week.