The Space Race was a contest for technological superiority that required guts as well as brains. At the beginning of the second half of the 20th Century, American rocket scientists and rocket wranglers combined their respective technology and guts to create “The Right Stuff” to win.

The race was effectively won when Neil Armstrong planted an American flag on the moon. Now NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is taking one more step for Mankind. Hours of raw film from the Golden Age of space exploration are now publicly available on YouTube, and some of this technology is out of this world.

The authentically grainy images of the M2F1 project, affectionately known as the flying bathtub being dragged across the desert by a 1963 Pontiac convertible aren’t just cool, they could lead to the next big scientific breakthrough. NASA’s motivation for releasing the footage on the free and open Internet platform goes beyond assigning proper attribution to those heroes who risked and lost their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and National pride. This remarkable footage that exhibits the Wild West spirit and landscape made history in the Nevada and California deserts. It is meant to romanticize and thus inspire resurgence in space exploration and the quest for understanding our Universe.

Once the domain of Governments and Intelligence credentials, space exploration is now available everyone with a telescope and an Internet connection. But lest we forget the exploits of these original cowboy cosmonauts, who forged the critical path that allowed Elon Musk’s Space X and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to get off the ground, will indelibly endeavor on YouTube and beyond.

This amazing footage is proof of extraordinary human achievement and will now be available to future generations as a lesson of bravery and sacrifice to which benefited our world astronomically.