The Space Shuttle programme spent three decades flying and three decades being filmed by the BBC, and this six-part Horizon compilation cuts that footage into a full biography of the machine. It opens with the Columbia disaster: on 1 February 2003, minutes before landing and after a 16-day mission, the shuttle broke apart over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Horizon interviews the people who actually handled the aftermath, tracing the investigation back to how Columbia had been modified for scientific testing in the first place, and letting the technical detail explain what went wrong rather than dramatizing it. The wider series draws on archive interviews and mission footage built up across the shuttle's whole working life, following the program from its early promise as a reusable spacecraft through the controversies that dogged it. The question running underneath every episode is blunt: does the shuttle belong in the history books as a genuine achievement in human spaceflight, or as an expensive design that never worked as advertised.