ABOVE AND BEYOND: NASA’S JOURNEY TO TOMORROW Centerpiece Screening

ABOVE AND BEYOND: NASA’S Journey To Tomorrow examines the remarkable role NASA plays both in our country and for our planet. Covering sixty years and beyond, the film celebrates past accomplishments, investigates current initiatives,
and surveys future plans. This film follows NASA to the moon, to the surface of Mars, to the outer reaches of our solar system and, above all, back to our home base: Earth.

In 1961, in announcing the moon shot, President Kennedy issued a great challenge, a challenge that would in many ways set NASA on its course: “We have given this program a high national priority,” President Kennedy said. “Even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.” ABOVE AND BEYOND asks the question: what has become of President Kennedy’s faith in human ingenuity, his grand vision and aspiration?

For indeed, what is exploration if not an act of faith and vision—because we cannot know what benefits await us. And it is just this—the capacity to wonder—that best exemplifies NASA’s work—to strive, to reach, to uncover the unknown. More than any other institution in history, NASA harnesses humankind’s drive to discover, and embraces our unique need for answers—a need that may one day save us.

Here now, some six decades after Kennedy’s speech, when the merits and values of NASA are being hotly debated, ABOVE AND BEYOND takes measure. We stand in awe and admiration, bearing witness not only to all that NASA has given humankind, but also to the vital and ongoing role NASA plays in ensuring humankind’s future.

We follow as NASA searches for other life in our solar system and discovers habitable worlds orbiting neighboring stars. As it peers into the night sky with the Hubble Space Telescope discovering tens of thousands of hidden galaxies—

—and all the while, for more than half a century, never takes its eyes off our home planet. Monitoring the earth’s seas and skies, its snows and sands, in an unrelenting effort to amass the greatest store of knowledge in the history of humankind.

And here perhaps is one of the great surprises. As ABOVE AND BEYOND makes clear, just as NASA reaches out, journeying further and further into space, perhaps one day even carrying humankind to other planets—NASA also observes our own planet, working to track the Earth’s environmental systems so as to keep our home in balance. Even as its telescopes point deep into other realms, NASA also watches over Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef, over the rising sea levels in the Atlantic Ocean, over the water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

Rory Kennedy tells the stories of the women and men behind the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s decades-long exploration of our solar system, our universe and our planet in this enlightening film that celebrates NASA’s triumphs, mourns its tragedies and affirms the importance of its mission both in space and on Earth.