15 Best Movies for Kids Who Love Space

WALL-E may be the best first space movie for a young child. The story begins with one lonely little robot cleaning up an abandoned Earth and eventually expands into a full space adventure.

It introduces enormous ideas—spacecraft, robots, artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and humanity's future in space—without requiring kids to understand any of them first. It is also unusually good at telling a story visually, so younger children can follow WALL-E and EVE even when they do not understand every part of the larger plot.

For a child who is not ready for alien invasions or astronauts in mortal danger, Jungle Beat: The Movie offers a much gentler version of first contact.

A young alien arrives in the African jungle and encounters a group of animals who suddenly discover that they can talk. The space element is simple, colorful and much less intimidating than most extraterrestrial stories, making this a good bridge between ordinary children's animation and bigger science-fiction adventures.

Forget for a moment that Buzz Lightyear began as a toy. Lightyear plays much more like a children's introduction to classic science fiction: astronauts, an alien planet, hyperspace, time dilation, robots and a seemingly impossible mission.

Some of the science is obviously exaggerated for the story, but concepts such as time passing differently for travelers moving at extreme speeds can lead to genuinely interesting conversations afterward.

A boy disappears in 1978 and mysteriously returns eight years later without having aged. Then NASA discovers a spacecraft.

Flight of the Navigator is one of those older family movies that can introduce kids to science fiction without dropping them immediately into a giant franchise. There is a spacecraft, an alien intelligence, time travel and a kid at the center of everything.

This is the movie on this list most likely to make a kid go outside and try to build something.

Based on the story of future NASA engineer Homer Hickam, October Sky follows a teenager in a West Virginia coal town who becomes fascinated by rockets after seeing Sputnik cross the night sky. Homer's persistent curiosity drives the film.

It is great for STEM-minded kids who would rather watch Mark Rober on YouTube than the Kansas City Chiefs win another Super Bowl.

Not everyone who gets humanity into space sits on top of the rocket.

Hidden Figures tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three Black women whose mathematics and engineering work played an important role in America's early space program.

For kids fascinated by NASA, this widens their understanding of what it really takes. America needs astronauts. It also needs mathematicians, programmers, engineers and people willing to solve problems nobody has solved before.

If your child wants to know what an actual NASA mission feels like, start here.

Apollo 13 dramatizes the real 1970 lunar mission that became a desperate effort to bring three astronauts safely home after an oxygen tank exploded in space. The remarkable part is not simply the danger. It is the problem-solving.

Astronauts and engineers have to work with the equipment already aboard the spacecraft, ration resources, calculate trajectories and solve one engineering problem after another while lives hang in the balance. For the kid who says, ‘I'll never need this,’ while doing math homework, Apollo 13 asks: but what if you did?

What if Treasure Island happened in space? That is the irresistible premise of Treasure Planet, with spacecraft instead of pirate ships and Jim Hawkins heading across the universe in search of legendary treasure.

This is a pure space adventure, and it is a lot of fun.

Technically, most of The Iron Giant takes place on Earth. But the mystery at its center comes from the stars.

A boy discovers an enormous robot that has apparently arrived from space. What begins as a wonderful ‘kid finds a giant robot’ story eventually becomes something deeper about friendship, fear, violence and choosing what kind of person—or machine—you want to be.

For generations of children, Star Wars was not just another space movie. It was the space movie.

Luke Skywalker leaves a desert planet, joins a mysterious old warrior, meets smugglers and droids, rescues a princess and attacks a space station the size of a moon. And do not come at me with claims of ‘spoilers’ as though you have never seen it. It is nearly 50 years old and probably the most culturally influential space film in history. You know the plot.

Star Wars turns the galaxy far, far away into the ultimate adventure playground.

For some modern kids, The Force Awakens may be an easier gateway into Star Wars than the 1977 original.

Rey, Finn and BB-8 introduce a new generation of heroes while giving kids the familiar Star Wars combination of planets, spacecraft, strange creatures, droids and enormous battles.

We would still start with the original trilogy if you plan to watch the whole saga, but this works well as a standalone space adventure for kids accustomed to contemporary action movies.

For the kid who loves both space and strategy games, Ender's Game is an easy recommendation. It is also on the short list of the best sci-fi books made into a movie—though The Martian and Project Hail Mary both enter the conversation.

Ender Wiggin is recruited into an elite military school preparing children to defend Earth against another alien attack. Training involves zero-gravity combat, tactical games and increasingly complicated simulations.

The movie asks a much harder question: Does winning justify what you had to do to win? That makes Ender's Game more than a space-war movie. It is a good jumping-off point for conversations about leadership, manipulation, empathy and the moral consequences of decisions made at a distance.

Few movies make science look this useful or this cool.

Astronaut Mark Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars and has to figure out how to stay alive long enough for anyone to rescue him. That means growing food, producing water, repairing equipment, managing power, establishing communications with Earth, taking calculated risks and solving the next problem before the current one kills him.

For scientifically inclined older kids, The Martian might be the most entertaining STEM lesson on this entire list.

If your child loved the science and problem-solving in The Martian, Project Hail Mary should go near the top of the list.

Ryland Grace wakes up aboard a spacecraft without remembering why he is there. Reconstructing his mission becomes part of the mystery, but the larger story is built around scientific discovery, experimentation, communication and a threat that puts far more than one astronaut at risk.

It is one of the rare big-screen science-fiction movies in which figuring things out is as important as surviving them.

Interstellar is where this list graduates from ‘movies about space’ to ‘movies that may send your teenager down a three-hour internet rabbit hole about relativity.’

Earth is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit, and a team of explorers travels through a wormhole looking for another world capable of supporting humanity. Along the way, the movie plays with black holes, gravity, time dilation, planetary science and the enormous distances involved in interstellar travel.

Some of its ideas are challenging even for adults. That is a feature, not a bug.