Here’s the thing: most VR “experiences” are marketing fluff. Someone put a 360° camera in a pretty place, called it immersive, and asked for ten dollars. Space Explorers is not that. This is footage shot by actual astronauts aboard the International Space Station over the course of two years, using a custom-built camera hardened to survive the vacuum of space, ionizing radiation, and temperature swings of five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. When I first loaded it up, I stopped mid-sentence and just stared.
Space Explorers: The ISS Experience is a four-part VR documentary series from Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Studios, produced in partnership with NASA. It won an Emmy in 2021 for Outstanding Interactive Program, and for good reason — there’s simply nothing else like it in VR. The first episodes drop you inside the ISS for an intimate look at astronaut life: how they eat, exercise, work, and stare out the Cupola window at Earth rolling by underneath them. Then the later episodes go further. Episode 4, EXPAND, includes the first-ever 360° stereoscopic spacewalk filmed outside the station. The camera was mounted on the Canadarm2 robotic arm and floated up to fifteen meters away from the station, giving you the uncanny sensation of hanging in open space above Earth.
In November 2025, Felix & Paul released Space Explorers: Ultimate Edition for Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S, combining all previous episodes under one roof and adding a new chapter, Mission to the Moon, that documents NASA’s Artemis program training. It also introduces mixed reality features — after watching a video, you unlock a 3D model of a related space artifact that you can bring into your living room. Fly a T-38 jet model around your couch. Toss the microgravity football they use on the station. It’s a clever way to add tactile presence to what is otherwise a passive viewing experience.
And passive it is. This is not a game. You navigate 3D environments by hand gestures, select glowing orbs to enter 360° video moments, and watch. That’s the loop. For some people that will be a dealbreaker — if you want interactivity, puzzles, or agency, this offers none of that. But if you want to understand what life in orbit actually looks and feels like, this is as close as a headset gets.
The content is the undeniable strength here. The spacewalk footage in particular is the kind of thing that makes you forget you’re wearing a headset. Real astronauts, real station, real void. The proximity of the 360° captures — placed in the exact modules where they were filmed — creates a sense of personal discovery rather than passive broadcast. You choose which orbs to enter and which astronauts to spend time with. One moment you’re watching Christina Koch braid a colleague’s hair in microgravity, the next you’re outside the station watching Earth drift by in absolute silence.
But the app wrapper around this extraordinary footage has problems, and they matter. The Ultimate Edition switched to a streaming-only model — episodes can no longer be downloaded for offline playback. During testing on a fast connection, reviewers reported buffering dropouts every few minutes. That’s a death sentence for immersion when you’re trying to float in space. The 3D navigation environments also suffer from low resolution and visible aliasing on Quest 3, which is baffling given that the app is exclusive to newer hardware. And the decision to use hand-only gesture controls with no controller fallback makes navigation less precise than it should be. You will accidentally select the wrong orb. You will wave your hand twice to get a response.
There’s also a structural design issue: the ethereal orbs you select to enter video clips have no preview icons or labels. You can’t tell what’s inside until you click. Once viewed, an orb disappears for that session, so if you found a favorite moment and want to revisit it immediately, you’re out of luck. For a series with over two hours of footage distributed across multiple chapters, that’s a poor way to help users find their way back to the good stuff.
Who is this really for? If you’re a space enthusiast, a VR newcomer looking for a comfortable first experience, or someone who wants to show a skeptical friend what VR can actually do, Space Explorers is an easy recommendation. It’s free, it’s seated, it causes zero motion sickness, and the content is legitimately moving. The Spacewalkers episode alone is worth the download. But if you’re looking for gameplay, interactivity, or a polished app experience without streaming hiccups, you’ll need to set your expectations accordingly.
Felix & Paul Studios has built something genuinely important here — a historical document of human spaceflight captured in a medium that lets you stand inside it. The footage will endure. The app delivering it feels rushed. Install it, watch the spacewalk, forgive the buffering, and hope the next update lets you download the episodes again.