Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land was ignored by most moviegoers. And the few who did catch it were in for something weird: Instead of a jingoistic celebration of American ingenuity and macho astronauts, it was an exploration of loss. The film focuses heavily on the passing of Neil Armstrong’s (Ryan Gosling) young daughter, Karen, but also on the specter of death that haunted everyone being strapped onto a rocket. They weren’t even safe during routine safety checks — it brutally depicts the Apollo 1 command module fire, a freak accident that occurred during a simulated launch, killing the three astronauts aboard. And then there were the family issues: leaving your loved ones in a constant state of panic, and never being around enough to comfort them.

Still, even with death around the corner, First Man brilliantly depicts NASA’s ingenuity during the ’60s, armed with nothing more than math, some very basic computers, and cracker-jack piloting. We get to see Armstrong recover Gemini 8 after it starts rolling out of control. Later, during the Apollo 11 mission, we can feel the panic as he’s forced to manually land the lunar rover, after noticing issues with the initial landing site. We know how the story ends, of course. But the film depicts the personal costs for Armstrong better than anything we’ve seen before.

Where to watch: VOD, HBO, Blu-ray

Chasing the Moon

PBS’s three-part series is similar to Apollo 11, since it’s also relying on newly found footage. But it’s decidedly more intimate. We get to see the inside of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman’s house, for example, where his wife seems to be dreading the entire ordeal. It’s guided by archived news footage, with some fresh interviews with the likes of Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. And at a lengthy six hours, it has plenty of time to dive into the context of things like what the Space Race actually means.

Where to watch: PBS

Hidden Figures

While astronauts were uniformly white men for decades, women were left to handle much of the computational that actually got them into space. And within that group, there were plenty women of color “computers” who never got their due in popular culture. Hidden Figures follows three notable black women — Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who helped NASA calculate crucial flight trajectories; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer); and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), NASA’s first African-American female engineer — as they fight to make their talents recognized. Even though NASA was still more progressive than most other employers by seeking out women of color, it also forced them to live through plenty of indignities, like being forced to walk long distances to use segregated bathrooms.

Where to watch: VOD, Blu-ray

Also check out:

• The Martian (VOD and HBO): A pro-science look at what our future of Mars exploration could look like.
• Missions to the Moon (National Geographic): A short and sweet documentary that boils down highlights of the Apollo missions.
• The Right Stuff (VOD, Blu-ray): The classic macho astronaut film covering the first batch of Mercury 7 astronauts.

Images: NASA; Hidden Figures: Twentieth Century Fox