Hopefully, the footage is better than the missed pan up at lift-off, and showing spectators at the time of booster separation.<p>I understand funding cuts and all, but this is a once-in-a-generation moment and it’s filmed with no apparent effort whatsoever.
They missed it pulling off the pad, they then had a picture of the plume, the wide shot off the pad was quite a bit too late also, then they missed the separation of the boosters and the upper stage separation.<p>Honestly it looks like they intentionally missed every high risk procedure intentionally and cut back a few seconds after it had succeeded.You don't make this many mistakes one after the other accidentally, its easier to do this right than wrong, cutting to the crowd as booster separation occurs was clearly intentional. I take this as NASA had very little confidence in this launch and was avoiding showing all the moments it could go wrong live.
Clearly, you've never worked with a live video crew. If they have no practice, it's amazing how bad you can appear with a lack of appreciation of how fast things move. You also have to remember the camera/operator are really far away with a very large zoom. Things leave your field a view much faster than anticipated. After that, any correction becomes over corrections again because of the zoom factor. Also, I would not be surprised if people were watching IRL as much as their screens/viewfinders.<p>I've seen it in sports where someone just not up to speed is always behind the play and the center of action is just out of frame. At that point, you zoom out some to recenter and then zoom back in. Or the director cuts away and lets you catch up. But that's assuming competency up the chain.
No, after talking to NASA people, this is just incompetence.
Agreed. There was high quality alternative streaming from other sources, how come NASA couldn't get their shit together? The spectacle is important for public support!<p>I still don't understand why they didn't show the final 10 seconds countdown, basically the most iconic moment of any launch. They literally hid the clock! I was hoping to count it down with my family.<p>If they were scared of accidents they could have streamed it with a delay.
What is the current best way to watch the take off? I was out of town and want to watch it with family this weekend in fake/pretend real time, so would love a good YouTube or otherwise source :)
Isn't Trump supposed to be the king of spectacle? Why weren't there fighter jets doing low-passes supersonic for each final second?<p><i>Alright, Kif, let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can do</i>
That’s so conspiratorial. They could just stream with a slightly delay to interrupt the feed on disaster. I think it’s way more likely they just didn’t have a good broadcasting team.
The camera and simulation footage were a bit of a letdown and something SpaceX does much better. On the other hand NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form where science takes precedence over presentation. For that money however I concur - I expected more. Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for it
> <i>Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for it</i><p>Livestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really <i>should</i> be using KSP for it - it's not hard to wire up with external telemetry, and with couple graphics mods, it looks <i>way</i> better than whatever expensive commercial professional grade simulator rendering they're using (which I suspect is part of a package that may be really, really great at simulations - and is intentionally not great at visuals of this kind, as it doesn't show anything that isn't <i>directly</i> representing some measurement).
I suspect this is a frequency thing. Early SpaceX broadcasts were pretty rough. NASA just doesn't do launch coverage with the same sort of cadence.<p>Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.
I think this is a “you have one job” kind of thing for shooting liftoff (no matter what quality of equipment is on hand): rocket goes up, tilt camera up.<p>Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.
SpaceX had a lot of rough footage before they figured it out and they have many more tries to correct it
They did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off<p><a href="https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-how-nasa-captured-lunar-lift-off" rel="nofollow">https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-...</a>
If I saw that in any other context I would have assumed it was a low budget special effect--mostly due the spray of rainbow sparkles when the module separates from the base.
It's a sequential colour camera, each field is red, green or blue filtered (using a spinning colour wheel), and they're processed back on earth to recombine them into a colour TV picture. Doesn't work that well with fast motion, as there's too much movement between the red, green, and blue images, hence the rainbowing. They were of course bandwidth limited so conventional NTSC might be an issue. Also a normal colour TV camera at the time used three (or four) image tubes, rather than the one in the Apollo cameras, which would have added size and weight (this is before things like CCDs were practical).
We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t have HD footage of the man going to the moon.<p>/s but not really
Was going to say, I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.<p>And NASA probably does have great video of it available, it’s just the live broadcast that missed it.
> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.<p>This was 8 years ago and is one of the greatest stuff I've seen in space launches. The footage is so epic that it even got replicated in SciFi series! ... <a href="https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1313" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1313</a><p>This was 9 years ago, first droneship landing - <a href="https://youtu.be/7pUAydjne5M?t=1642" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/7pUAydjne5M?t=1642</a><p>And this is 18 years ago, their first Falcon1 launch - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bET0mRnqxQM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bET0mRnqxQM</a><p>More live video from the ascent than we got on Artemis2 for sure...
> evoke a feeling of substance over form...<p>The feeling it evoked in me was that a multi billion dollar PR program could surely afford to spend a <i>little</i> bit of money on reliable camera tracking, telemetry overlays, visualisations that run at more than 0.1 FPS, etc.<p>Absolutely bizarre.
Indeed. This has been my gripe since first SpaceX booster landing attempts - I understand that "livestream from an IMAX camera" may be very low at the list of priorities for space missions, but... it shouldn't. Even if recovered after the fact, having a solid, high-quality footage from flight and orbit would make a huge impact on the publicity goals they're all explicitly trying to achieve. There's a shortage of good footage from space; at this point, a 4k/60FPS recording released in public domain would easily redefine how space scenes look in movies, TV and video games in the next decade[0].<p>I'm not saying it's an easy engineering problem, but at least for LEO, the recording side is a solved problems (we all carry more than good enough hardware in our pockets), and the major challenge would be about keeping the lense/viewport clear throughout the ascent, and dealing with vibrations.<p>--<p>[0] - It already happened many times. The step shift of how black holes are portrayed after <i>Interstellar</i> folks did the math is the most obvious one to notice; more subtly recent productions seem to also take into account the asymmetry of the brightness, after the telescope photo of a black hole reached public awareness. But even earlier, there's e.g. been a change of how planets are shown - you see much less of the geographical atlas spheres with clear continent lines, and much more of low-angle, close-up shots that look suspiciously similar to the footage from the International Space Station.
> at this point, a 4k/60FPS recording released in public domain would easily redefine how space scenes look in movies, TV and video games in the next decade[0].<p>no? why you think it would ? We know how it looks like already
Even SpaceX is only okay with their broadcasts. They normalized showing very little data and spending the whole time with talking heads that don't say anything.<p>Go look what the livestream was like for the Mars Curiosity rover, it was fantastic, and that was on a mission taking place 8 minutes away. Their simulation was mostly Demo data for some parts of the mission, but included such things as what part of the control program it was in! It was even a good rendering. I screenshotted it for a desktop background.<p>But the camera quality is so low and I don't get it.<p>It seems like the entire industry has just ignored the lessons of old: "Get someone who does this for a living". They should have connections and partnerships with movie companies who actually know how to run cameras. That shouldn't be expensive nowadays, as that knowledge seems to be cheap enough for Youtube creators.
> NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form<p>For real?<p>I was rolling my eyes hard at:<p><pre><code> GC systems go?
GC systems go for all for humanity!
</code></pre>
And then the VERY scripted pre-launch speeches. It’s like everyone there had been taking notes from inspirational hero movies.<p>It’s cool. But let’s not act like going around the moon is the most historic thing ever… since we’ve already done it plenty, right?
They literally played clips from actors in recent moon movies so yes, they definitely were taking notes from movies.
The entire prelaunch is scripted. Safety is the point of prelaunch checklists and polls. Why would you get bent out of shape over each of them being able to give their own response to the final call before launch?
What NASA does goes in the history books.<p>What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.
Artemis has a budget of over 90 billion dollars, it's more than 4 billion for that Artemis II launch (as estimated by NASA, possibly more because they don't even know exactly how much they're spending). For that price one might reasonably expect a couple of quality cameras for the public to be able to view what their money was spent on. For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!<p>NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
>For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!<p>With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??
Apollo 11 (which included actually landing on the Moon for the first time in human history!) cost only $355 million* in 1969. That's a little over 3 billion in 2025 dollars. How has a comperatively "simple" flyby become so expensive?<p>You could also look at the same ISS mission with another contractor: Boeing got paid twice as much and then failed to bring the astronauts back in Starliner. So obviously NASA is overpaying some contractors, but that's probably only part of the story of where all that money is going. For 90 billion NASA would have delivered multiple Moon landings in the 70s - with inferior tech at that, and having to figure it all out for the first time. Don't underestimate how difficult it was.<p>* <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964622000029" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...</a>
NASA's public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.
They had 4000 people cut in 2025 and big budget cut in 2026.<p>Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.
My first thought is SpaceX and Elon would have done this so much better.<p>I felt I watching the launch through someone's iPhone.
It’s not rocket science, it’s media production/direction.
if you haven't seen the footage from someone in a passenger jet nearby, it rocks<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1sagcc1" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1sagcc1</a><p><a href="https://v.redd.it/l11tehzzvrsg1/CMAF_720.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://v.redd.it/l11tehzzvrsg1/CMAF_720.mp4</a><p>Think about how much technology evolved to create that scene, to fly nearby and being used to take that video, wow
Minimum effort has always been NASA's approach to online streaming tbf, 720p potato quality cameras with lots of mission control static shots. I think SpaceX were the first ones to provide anything at full HD with relevant stuff being shown at all times.
Crazy that a dude from Iowa and his ragtag group of rocket watchers does a better job with launch coverage than NASA. I can't believe they cut away during booster separation. Absolute shit show.
maybe they should turn back and do it again
This isn't the last run for this rocket, is it? We'll do it again.<p>And when we do it again, maybe we should pay the dude from Iowa (who has made a career out of things like streaming rocket launches on video) to provide his team's shots and editing for the official live feed when launch time comes up.
Remember to post the link in HN next launch:<p>something like> <i>It's better to watch the tivestream for DudeFromIowa that usualy has a better coverage than Nasa <a href="http://www.youtube.com/whatever" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/whatever</a> .</i>
We've already seen what happens when you allow social media types to infect the government.<p>Let's not foster any more of it.
<i>Crazy that a dude from Iowa and his ragtag group of rocket watchers does a better job with launch coverage than NASA.</i><p>You may not have noticed, but NASA was also launching an actual rocket at the time. Conducting a livestream and conducting a livestream while launching a rocket to the other side of the moon are hardly equivalent.<p><i>Absolute shit show.</i><p>You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show."
So an organization as large as NASA can either walk, or chew gum -- but cannot do both at the same time?
Eh, separation of concerns. Given NASA's PR budget, it seems reasonable that they should be able to produce quality launch coverage.<p>The many people involved in safely launching a rocket are not responsible for providing launch coverage, and the people who provide launch coverage are not allowed to interfere with the many people involved in safely launching a rocket. If they're going to do a bad job at one of those jobs I'd much rather they do a bad job at providing launch coverage, but the two are not mutually exclusive.
Did they also shut down the bathrooms? You know, to focus the mind?<p>That is the worst possible take. The people launching the rocket and the people filming the launch are not actually the same people, nor do they take the same resources.<p>> You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show."<p>I wish more people did. We certainly have an excess supply of shit shows these days.
> missed pan up at lift-off<p>Tilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from "panorama".
I’ve read elsewhere that the cut-away during booster separation was intentional given the high risk manoeuvre.<p>If something went wrong / explosion etc, then they wouldn’t want to broadcast it.<p>Something to that effect. I’m paraphrasing someone else.