The history of space travel

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.We start with the broadcaster and naturalist, Sir David Attenborough. To mark his 100th birthday, we go back to the mid 1950s and the television programme that launched his caree ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This week, we hear from a perfumer who in 1990 helped create the world’s first perfume archive in Versailles France. Our guest is Dr William Tullett, a Senior Lecturer in Histor ...  Show more

In 1973, while the world watched the Apollo missions end, something extraordinary happened in the Amazon jungle. A rocket carried humanity's most advanced spacecraft toward Mars, crewed by familiar names: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Ilyushin.Project ...  Show more

Mike Massimino, serving as a NASA astronaut until 2014, has a slew of accomplishments: the first human to tweet from space, the last astronaut to work inside the Hubble Telescope and the speculated inspiration for George Clooney’s role in “Gravity.” He’s now out with a book, titl ...  Show more

On 13 April 1970, a Moon mission almost ended in tragedy, after an explosion on board the spaceship.Fred Haise was one of the Apollo 13 astronauts. In 2010, he spoke to Richard Howells about how they managed to get back to Earth against the odds.Eye-witness accounts brought to li ...  Show more

2024 is an exciting year for lunar exploration. For Inside Science this week Marnie Chesterton investigates the planned missions to the Moon over the next twelve months. It’s been more than fifty years since the last manned mission to the Moon was completed. But that’s about to c ...  Show more