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The Race to Space

   2022    Technology
A new era of space is dawning where small satellites no bigger than a shoebox will be deployed not in one or twos, but in their thousands - referred to as satellite swarms. It's been described as the democratization of space. What was once the preserve of governments and superpowers is evolving into a truly global industry. The catalyst for this dramatic change is this new generation of satellites.
Series: Engineering the Future

Perpetual Power

   2021    Technology
The meteoric rise of renewable energy has consequences for our electricity supply. While coal and gas fired power stations can generate electricity whenever you need it, renewables are intermittent by nature. So we need a backup plan for when the wind stops or the sun goes down.
All over the world, engineers and scientists are racing to solve one key problem; how to safely and efficiently store electricity at a huge scale but at a low cost. The quest is producing some truly remarkable ideas and this episode details three of them.
Series: Engineering the Future

Super Telescope: Mission to the Edge of the Universe

   2022    Technology
As NASA releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken? The successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet.
The James Webb Telescope is an £8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk.
From its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.

Hitler Supercars

   2020    Culture
The film tells the story of the ill-fated Nazi Land Speed record attempts. This is a story of engineering excellence, Grand Prix racing, Nazi propaganda, celebrity, and an intense rivalry which would leave a speed record unbroken for 79 years and one of Nazi Germany's best racing drivers dead. During the rise of the Third Reich two German car manufacturers were ordered to build the most high performance vehicles the world had ever seen. What followed was a rivalry that would reap Grand Prix victories, international domination that was a propaganda coup, and provide world fame to its drivers who risked their lives smashing speed records that would stand for 79 years. All under the direct orders of the Fuhrer himself.
Bugatti and Alfa Romeo dominated racing before 1934. But the years from 1934 to 1939 were six tumultuous years in which Grand Prix racing was dominated by the German Auto Union, the arranged marriage of Audi, Horch, Wanderer, and DKW, and Mercedes-Benz teams and provided a spectacle of speed, sound and fury never previously attained and never since matched. There are few periods of racing that have excited as much interest, event attendance and sophistication of equipment as the era of the Silver Cars. They were so far ahead of their time that many of their accomplishments were not duplicated until Mercedes went racing again in the early 1950s. There is also something about men who faced the challenges of staying in a cockpit of a highly sophisticated machine capable of 200 mph with no safety systems. They were giants and among them were Italian Tazio Nuvolari and two greatest German pilots of the thirties, Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes and Auto Union's Bernd Rosemeyer who duelled with faster, more innovative and sleeker machines, developed in wind tunnels.
This special documentary charts the rise of Nazi Germany's dominate 'Silver Arrow' Grand Prix and Speed Record cars of the 1930's. Leading motor racing and World War 2 experts James Holland, Richard Williams, Eberhard Reuss and Chris Routledge tell the story of the Nazi funded Auto Union and Mercedes Benz 'National Racing Cars'. Hitler's Supercars interweaves the rise of the Third Reich with the racing exploits it funded and what propaganda messages these racing cars where sending.

Fallout

   2022    Technology
In the last episode, despite disturbing revelations of wrongdoing at Three Mile Island before and after the accident, the utility fights to bring the plant back online. Its Unit 1 had its license temporarily suspended following the incident at Unit 2. Although the citizens of the three counties surrounding the site voted by an overwhelming margin to retire Unit 1 permanently in a non-binding resolution in 1982, it was permitted to resume operations in 1985 following a 4–1 vote by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In 2017, it was announced that operations would cease by 2019 due to financial pressure from cheap natural gas, unless lawmakers stepped in to keep it open. Unit 1 shut down on September 20, 2019.
Billed as the worst nuclear incident in U.S. history, what’s particularly scary here is how close Three Mile Island incident came to becoming a national disaster. Without giving away the whole story, cost-cutting 'solutions' almost cause a catastrophic disaster.
Series: Meltdown: Three Mile Island

One Hour That Changed World: Moon Landing

   2022    Technology
The Moon Landing celebrates the historic 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, in a fresh and distinctive style. This inspiring documentary subverts usual conventions by beginning with the momentous event, exploring the preceding dramatic sixty minutes in granular detail.
Packed with surprising details which reveal a whole new perspective on the story of how humans landed on the moon, this documentary rewinds one hour before Neil Armstrong's famous footstep to reveal a whole untold story, hidden in the forensic moment-by-moment details driven by powerful footage from the time and authentic audio recordings from the capsule and the command module and mission control in Houston. In the last 60 minutes, the Apollo mission could fall apart. Without dazzling on-the-spot ingenuity, a 240,000-mile helpline to Houston, and almost unnatural abilities to remain calm under incredible pressure, the first step onto another world might not happen at all.
Beyond the Elements

Beyond the Elements

2020  Science
The Mind Explained

The Mind Explained

2019  Medicine
Top Gear

Top Gear

2012  Technology
The Story of China

The Story of China

2016  History
Chef's Table

Chef's Table

2017  Art