Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine

Half of it was interesting science and tech and beautiful imagery, the other half feelgoody blather about personal details and mini-bios of people involved.

The early development and various designs was glossed over by a guy petting his dog going through wrinkled papers on the dining-room table. Should have been more about why it uses infrared light and red-shifting of distant galaxies, why the Arianespace base in in south america. And so on.

The worst parts were the segments with the airheaded valley girl types on the phone screens jumping up and down saying "Ohmygod" "yay" etc. Gag me.........

This was the first of the Unknown documentaries that I watched. I chose this one as first because the subject is what interested me the most. We all are curious about the origins, about how everything started. Most likely questions that will never been answered, maybe partially, and that will be because of the James Webb telescope, an unbelievable human achievement. The documentary is well made, consisting of interviews of several people that were involved in launching the telescope. I get it that people that worked on this project for decades are getting emotional. The huge amount of money, the time spent, everything that could go wrong, it's all very stressful for those people. I would have liked more of those stunning space images. The ones they showed I've already seen them before, like most people I guess, so it would have been nice to show us some more images that were never released before. But other than that the documentary is informative and that's what its all about. A good watch if you're interested in space.

"Light in A Dark Time", a quote from a female astrophysicist on the show, is the best way to describe the James Webb telescope. The short documentary is definitely worth watching as it showcases the difficulty in designing, leading, getting funding, the disappointments and all hurdles that had to be overcome to be able to have the very risky and near impossible successful launch. Now that it is launched, humanity can see back in time 13 1/2 billion years ago, and the first image shared showed a massive amount of galaxies that old. I didn't give it a 10 star rating because quite honestly, if you are not an astrophysicist, and just a normal average citizen, it is extremely hard to wrap your mind around it (the shear time and distance of it) and hard to actually understand how truly awesome it is. Even by the awe on the astrophysicist's faces who do understand the meaning the Time Machine concept and distance, it is so amazing for them to comprehend it all as well at first look. Am sure it is just a first look at what is to come with more discoveries as scientists study the images.

In over an hour there's barely 5 mins of actual content that directly relate to the Webb telescope itself.

There is so so much of unnecessary nonsensical fillers it's just ridiculous!

Unknown alright. Viewers still know almost next to nothing about the Webb telescope, nothing more than a cutesy science phamlet for 8 yr olds at the school exhibition.

Even solo contributors have put out much much better YouTube content about the Webb telescope.

Scenes of people jogging, family photos, nobodies (to the viewers) talking about their 'feelings'??? Huh????

Giving it 2/10 makes me 'feel' so so generous. 🙄

As "Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine" (2023 release; 64 min.) opens, it is "13.8 Billion Years Ago" as the voice-over reminds us that is when the Big Bang occurred. We then go to "December 25, 2021" and the countdown for the launch of the James Web Space Telescope is on... Just before takeoff, we go back i1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope launched. At this point we are less than 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this documentary does a great job explaining some of te background as to what it is the James Webb Space Telescope actually does which its predecessor didn't do. Much attention is given to the 344 "single-point failures" which the 10,000 men and women who worked on the Webb for several decades, must avoid, an almost Herculean challenge. The big pay-off comes in the last 10-15 minutes when we get the spectacular photos which the Webb is now collecting, along with a treasure-trove of related data. One of the photo's shows a galaxy "being born" 13.2 billion years ago (yes, not all that long after the big bang). It also made me think how planet Earth has been fundamentally ravaged with in just the last 250 years or so (since the Industrial Revolution). This does not bode well for the future of humankind...Meanwhile, enjoy this every entertaining AND educational documentary. Can be viewed by anyone from ages 7 to 77.

"Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine" started streaming on Netflix a few days ago. If you have any interest in space or in human explorations, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.