Contribute Material

Help Complete the
Historical Record.

The archive grows through recordings and materials provided by space enthusiasts, engineers, former NASA personnel, families, and private collectors. Your rare historical media can be preserved, digitized, transcribed, and made searchable for future generations.

What We Are Looking For

Original media and materials from across the Space Shuttle era.

Video Tapes

VHS, Betamax, MiniDV

Audio Recordings

Cassettes, reel-to-reel, MP3

Documents & Photos

Flight logs, transcripts, notes, technical papers

Digital Files

Transfers, discs, and captures

Broadcast Material

Mission coverage, interviews, press briefings

Personal Collections

Privately held shuttle-era materials

Why Contribute

Your contribution helps preserve irreplaceable spaceflight history and makes it accessible to researchers, educators, and future generations. Original media can be safely returned after preservation and digitization.

Contributors are credited in the catalog and archive records according to their preferences, and sensitive materials are handled with care.

Preserve fragile media

Magnetic tape and film degrade over time. Contributing ensures these materials are saved before they are lost.

Reconnect fragmented records

Even small pieces can fill critical gaps and restore lost context across the wider archive.

Support research & education

Archival material powers scholarship, documentaries, and inspires future generations.

Recognition & attribution

Contributors are credited in the catalog and archive records according to their preferences.

Where Your Material Goes

Contributing helps preserve history and share it — it doesn't lock it away.

A growing selection of footage is shared publicly, free to watch, on ShuttleSource, the archive's parent project on YouTube, so anyone can browse the collection. Not everything is posted, but over time more and more footage is released to this channel. What spacearchive.ai adds on top is the work that makes decades of material usable: digitization, speaker-labeled transcripts, indexing, and search. Research access and licensing support that ongoing preservation work.

Visit ShuttleSource on YouTube →

Current Collection Gaps

The kinds of material where additional contributions would most strengthen the record right now.

Press Conferences & Briefings

Seeking pre- and post-mission press conferences, crew and program briefings, and news Q&A sessions from across the Shuttle program — the spoken record that puts each mission in context.

Early Shuttle Years (pre-STS-51L)

Seeking footage, audio, and documentation from the program's first years — STS-1 through the flights of 1985 — a period that is thinly represented and increasingly hard to recover.

Orbiter Processing & Behind the Scenes

Seeking material documenting orbiter processing and ground operations — work in the Orbiter Processing Facility, the VAB, and on the pad — that rarely made it to broadcast.

These are curatorial priorities and will be refined as the collection grows. If you have material outside these areas, we'd still love to hear from you.

What Happens Next?

A clear, documented path from your shelf to a searchable record.

1
We Evaluate
2
Document Provenance
3
Digitize & Preserve
4
Catalog & Index
5
Credit & Return

Contact About Donating Media

Every tape preserved is history saved.

If you have Space Shuttle-era recordings, documents, or photographs, we'd be glad to help preserve them — safely, with full attribution, and returned to you after digitization.