NASA is broadcasting history live on YouTube

Sixty years ago, as Russia and the U.S. were locked in fierce competition to achieve ever greater feats of space engineering and exploration, people watched launches and landings on their TVs, broadcast by major networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Now, we’re watching NASA and the crew of the Orion make humanity’s first trip back to the moon since 1972–and it’s all being streamed on YouTube and Twitch.

While Artemis II mission astronauts Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman set records in space, traveling farther from Earth than any other humans in history, NASA is beating its personal records on the internet.

Per data from Streams Charts, the April 1 launch of the Orion reached 10 million concurrent viewers across YouTube and Twitch. The most-watched distributor was NASA itself, with a YouTube stream that peaked at 3.9 million live viewers. Other top channels were NASA en Español, with 426K concurrent viewers, and Fox News, with 338K.

Streams Charts also gave a nod to YouTuber Everyday Astronaut, saying he achieved the highest viewership among individual, non-media streamers. It didn’t give exact numbers, but the VOD of his livestream now has 1.5 million views.

While the launch from Kennedy Space Center racked up major attention, things weren’t over. As the Orion sailed toward the moon, NASA continued broadcasting 24/7 on YouTube, offering two streams: one a silent video of live views from the Orion as it headed away from Earth; the other, an official “mission broadcast,” with the same views plus some shots from Control, with mission chatter audio.

Those streams are still ongoing, and at publication time have 8K and 81K concurrent viewers, respectively.

Of course, the Artemis II mission hit another significant milestone April 6, as the Orion made a loop around the far side of the moon. Stream viewership shot back up for that event, and while we don’t have total numbers yet, we do know NASA’s YouTube stream of the flyby has reached nearly 650K views so far. It was a 7-hour stream, including covering the harrowing (at least, for a viewer; NASA seemed pretty calm) 40 minutes when the Orion vanished behind the moon and had no radio contact with Earth.

One thing here at home was different between the launch stream and the flyby stream: Netflix joined in on the latter, broadcasting the Orion’s journey and publishing some related editorial content celebrating the crew’s achievements (as well as advertising that Netflix has “plenty more NASA+ live feeds headed your way in the future”).

This stream was part of an overall NASA x Netflix deal signed in summer 2025, where Netflix will broadcast live coverage of various rocket launches, spacewalks, etc. It’s not clear why it didn’t broadcast the Orion’s launch. Most of the content included in its deal also broadcasts for free on the streaming service NASA launched in 2023, NASA+.

We’re sure there will be further stream view spiking as the Orion returns to Earth and prepares for a (hopefully) safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. For now, NASA continues to broadcast 24/7 views from the Orion and mission chatter, giving thousands of live viewers a nonstop window into spaceflight.

Not to be too on the nose, but compared to the broadcasts of the 1960s, the access we have now–on YouTube, Twitch, and beyond–is a huge leap for curious minds. The TV programs following the Space Race were often time-limited (though some, like Walter Cronkite‘s 46-hour coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, stretched on), and we weren’t yet technologically capable of showing much live footage from space.

But look: At this moment, you can go to YouTube and see Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away. You can see what our astronauts see.

Incredible.