NASA to upload historic flight videos on YouTube

NASA will upload hundreds of historic videos of rare test flight launch and landing footage on YouTube and its website to better open access to the agency's archives, according to media reports. NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center has begun uploading its entire historical archive to YouTube.

It is all part of a continued effort to better open access to NASA's archives, as well as help inform the public about the types of research and record-setting milestones the agency achieves each year across various fields of aerospace engineering.

About 300 out of a total 500 clips have been uploaded to YouTube so far, with some footage going back many decades. The clips include everything from the assembly of the D- 558 Skystreak aircraft back in 1947 to a 1991 takeoff of a Lockheed Martin SR-71 stealth jet to hypersonic test flights of the unmanned NASA X-43A in 2004.

Though it was first uploaded back in March, people can also find the infamous 'Controlled Impact Demonstration' video in which NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration flew a Boeing 720 jet into a device that tore its wings off, resulting in a giant explosion and an hour-long fire.

Prior to today, the AFRC's video library was available only through the Dryden Aircraft Movie Collection on the website of the Dryden Flight Research Center, which was the name of the Armstrong facility before a 2014 change. Now that it is all on YouTube, it will be indexed by Google and more easily available through the company's search engine.