Customer Reviews

NASA UNAUTHORIZED

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

The documentary was dry and boring. They use the same footage of the ill-fated Columbia mission in two different places. Seeing them once wasn't too bad, but seeing the one astronaut and her wedding ring floating in zero-Gs from a chain around her neck as she was working was grim, knowing she was going to die and reshowing it was tasteless, in my opinion.

"If you missed that accident, here it is one more time!"

The soundtrack was enjoyable, but some of the dubbed video sequences were hard to follow and had somewhat poor sound quality. The DVD regrettably has no subtitles. The case and promotionals on the DVD ask questions that are barely addressed in the movie, like "Was NASA's trip to the moon a hoax?" in the movie "NASA quickly dismisses any mention of the Apollo Mission being a hoax." Thats about all the discussion on the point. Crummy. The DVD basically took a jerky, cursory look at the US space program and hovered in certain areas, notably the footage of the Columbia crew (twice!)that had arguably little relevance to the scope of the documentary. Check out "To the Moon". Much better fix for Lunar junkies.

This is possibly THE worst DVD ever on the this most amazing topic. I am not sure just how these producers managed to make it so tedious, and showed pictures of the Challenger tragedy while talking about Columbia TWICE. It really is very poor through and through. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT BUYING THIS ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL DVD.

This video may possibly the worst documentary of it's kind ever made! The narrator of this video speaks with soft and lifeless tone. Boring through and through!

I had to struggle to sit and watch this film after 10 minutes and in the end I given up. Put the DVD back into the case and never touch it again EVER!

Whatever you do, DO NOT but this film. There are many other documentary videos that WAY more interesting than this one!

The title of this documentary should be "Nasa Uneducated". Beginning with the first 8 minutes of footage. The narrator discusses the "rover mission" to Mars. His lack of detail is curious. He mentions the launch dates from the Cape, but doesn't say what year. He never mentions when they landed on Mars (January 2004) and doesn't say how long they operated except to say "over 300 Martian days". There is some good animation which looks like it was stolen from Nasa. The narrator doesn't even use the correct name of the mission: "Mars Exploration Rovers" and only mentions The Jet Propulsion Laboratory once. Anyone who knows anything about the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, will realize the footage in this film is from Mars Pathfinder, an entirely different mission!!! In fact, you can see "Pathfinder" buttons and signs in shots from the mission control room at JPL. What idiot mixed this up? It's like mistaking a Mercury spacecraft for Apollo. The footage continues with Pathfinder's mini rover, Sorjourner which was not much bigger than a skateboard. It's range was about 15 feet from the Pathfinder spacecraft. Meanwhile the narrator drones on about the rovers and their capabilities all while showing the wrong mission. Having worked at JPL when this mission occurred, I was pretty disappointed.

The film jumps from the very early days of Nasa after the Soviets had launched Sputnik, but then suddenly skips forward to 1986 and the Challenger shuttle tragedy. Again, the narrator is very thin on information and goes many minutes without saying anything. Then when does speak, he never mentions a single astronaut by name and then claims the crew of "three men and two women" were assigned. There were seven astronauts on Challenger!! He later states that puffs of black smoke came from the "pipes" on the spacecraft and this alarmed people at the space station. What space station??? It was 1986, we had no space station and no one knew anything was wrong until after the vehicle had exploded. Even my 8 year kid knows that. Where are they getting their information? The narration is so poorly written it's difficult to watch. He calls the flight controllers "crewmembers" and later claims Ronald Reagan gave "his state of the union" speech where he mourned the loss of the crew. That was not The State of the Union Address!! It's as if he's recording the narration while watching the footage, but has no grasp of NASA history.

The next segment begins claiming the shuttle program was scheduled to start in the early 80's but was delayed. What? The first flight of Columbia was in 1981 and continued regularly until 2003. He then states Columbia was designed for a special mission, STS-107. Columbia had already flown many mission successfully. It was part of the regular rotation of shuttle flights, except that it could not dock with the International Space Station as it didn't have a docking collar. The narrator then states the crew had "the first non-American man attempting to orbit in space." WHAT? This is grossly inaccurate. First of all, the Russians were first to orbit the Earth in a spacecraft in 1961. They were first to walk in space. They had the first space station. Russians have had over 100 cosmonauts orbit the Earth. Even Nasa has had many Astronauts from other countries fly on our Space Shuttle during the 80's and 90's. Colonel Ilan Roman was the first Israeli astronaut, but many foreigners from Germany, Canada, the UK, France, Poland, Japan, and several others had been in space before. Again, the footage doesn't match the narration. There are shots of astronauts preparing for launch, but they are not from Columbia STS-107, they are from some other mission. They are not even the people he's talking about! At one point, you can see "DISCOVERY" printed on the side of the spacecraft!

I recommend that you stay away from this horrid film. It's not even a good student project as it makes no attempt to get the facts straight.

There's so bad it's good, and then there's just bad. This documentary is the worst pile I've ever seen. I love the part where they're showing the NASA Pathfinder reentry animation and calling it Spirit and Discovery. Littered with false information and poor English, this thing is like a high school book report done the night before set to motion.

Do not buy NASA Unauthorized: Unrevealed Secrets of Space (2005)- This film should be banned and taken off the free market as it gets space history almost entirely wrong! As said before, the narration does not match the footage and the information presented is just wrong, and probably through plain stupidity!

Someone has tried to assemble a soundtrack that might have have been scripted by any high school student with a very weak background in space history and a small staff of translators to translate this missinformation for the world market.

Parts are often repeated, the wrong launch vehicle and satellite are shown during the narration, footage is repeated, and contradictory information stated. I can't say enough to warn everyone away from this amateurish production. Amazon, I am surprised at you for continuing to make this selection available!

Don't Buy This...I'd select "0" stars if I could. Unfortunatlely, I bought it in a bundle with a bunch of other space themed DVDs without reading the other reviews. The facts are inaccurate, the footage is constantly repeated and doesn't match the narration, and the narrator can't even pronounce names and facts correctly. It's produced by "SHAMI Productions." It's a SHAM-i alright. I wouldn't buy any of their products after this. I watched about half before throwing it in the garbage.

This is the absolute worst space "documentary" I have ever had the misfortune of seeing. I put the word documentary in quotes because due to the blatant errors in this video, calling it a documentary is not appropriate.

First as the others have pointed out, showing images of Pathfinder while discussing the Mars Rovers is a grievous error, but then they go on to say that Columbia was built for a special mission, STS-107 (while showing footage of Discovery). Hello?! What? How ridiculous- Columbia was the first orbiter to fly and completed many missions prior to STS-107. Then, when it talks about the Columbia disaster, it says that the search was conducted over water and shows an image of a boat, when the Columbia search was entirely over land. The image they show of the wreckage are not of Columbia either. All of the other errors previous reviewers have pointed out are valid as well.

When the film goes into the earlier days of space, it constantly jumps around erratically between Explorer 1, Vanguard, Sputnik, Mercury, Apollo, and Vostok 1 and rarely shows the correct vehicle image when speaking of any of them. It claims John Glenn was the first man in orbit, even after discussing Yuri Gagarin's flight (I think they believe that Yuri's flight was suborbital). It then goes on to say that Eisenhower created NASA not realizing that NACA already existed. What? Seriously?

At this point I couldn't bear to watch it anymore, so I don't know how bad the rest of it was. Avoid like the plague, unless you want to make it into a drinking game- like 'drink whenever you spot an error.' Prepare to get wasted.

I'm a real fan of good documentaries, but this one takes the Razzie. I didn't expect much, admittedly, but hoped for at least some footage I had not seen before. That's exactly what I got, thrown together, mostly out of order and with an real amateurish quality to the production's graphics.

For me the worst part was the inaccurate information. When the narration mentioned seeking pieces of Columbia (which broke up mostly over Texas) they showed video of the ocean search for Challenger. When the narration described Ronald Reagan speaking movingly of the Challenger victims during his State of the Union address, they showed him speaking at the Cape's memorial service. When the John Glenn launch was shown, he is described as the "First Man In Space." I could give dozens more examples.

As others have mentioned, the clips are out of order. I can't even call them "reversed" in that footage from the 50's and 60's is thrown around randomly making this a mish-mash of a film that looks worse than most high school productions posted on file sharing sites.

DO NOT show your kids this film. Get a better, more historically accurate review of NASA and the space program. This title needs to be dumped and deserves only one-tenth of a star.

If you are looking for a film chronicling NASA or featuring a behind the scenes view, you wont find it here. This film is poorly written, poorly constructed and inaccurate. Despite what the title might imply, the inaccuracies aren't agenda driven or sensationalistic, they're are just either wrong or misleadingly presented.

This documentary is presented like a high school freshman's term paper coupled with public domain film from NASA coupled with the lowest priced royalty free music the filmaker could find. This isn't even student film project level. This should be shown in documentary film making classes for all it's examples of what not to do. It's also a shining example of why fact checkers should be employed by documentary filmakers.

It opens with a bad black and white aged film look applied to video from the late 80s and goes on to show the several minutes of animations, stills, and film of the Sojourner rover being tested and landing on Mars referring to them as the "Rover Explorer Mission" (he means Mars Exploration Rovers) and talking of the rovers "Sprit" and "Opportunity" while showing the Mars Pathfinder mission and Sojourner rover. This movie was produced in 2005. Information and video on the MER rovers had been readily available for 1-2 years at that point but the filmaker chose not to use them for some unknown reason. Does he not know the difference between the missions, or is he just lazy?

The historical rocket development segment is also poorly and misleadingly constructed. As the narrator talks of Vanguard, the filmaker shows a test of the Mercury pad abort system and then later a Saturn V launch, all interspersed with . Why? Does the filmaker not know the difference or is it just there to fill time and the filmarker doesn't think the audience will notice. And that's before the documentary even makes it to the shuttle program.

I could go on and on about all the small but important details that the documentary gets wrong but you get the point.