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Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps
- xattt 7mo agoHopefully, the footage is better than the missed pan up at lift-off, and showing spectators at the time of booster separation. I understand funding cuts and all, but this is a once-in-a-generation moment and it’s filmed with no apparent effort whatsoever.
- piyh 7mo agoCrazy 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.
- therouwboat 7mo agomaybe they should turn back and do it again
- ssl-3 7mo agoThis isn't the last run for this rocket, is it? We'll do it again. 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.
- reaperducer 7mo agoWe've already seen what happens when you allow social media types to infect the government. Let's not foster any more of it.
- ithkuil 7mo agoI wouldn't mind if they were actually competent in what they do.
- gus_massa 7mo agoRemember to post the link in HN next launch: something like> It's better to watch the tivestream for DudeFromIowa that usualy has a better coverage than Nasa http://www.youtube.com/whatever http://www.youtube.com/whatever .
- reaperducer 7mo agoCrazy that a dude from Iowa and his ragtag group of rocket watchers does a better job with launch coverage than NASA. 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. Absolute shit show. You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show."
- ssl-3 7mo agoSo an organization as large as NASA can either walk, or chew gum -- but cannot do both at the same time?
- unregistereddev 7mo agoEh, separation of concerns. Given NASA's PR budget, it seems reasonable that they should be able to produce quality launch coverage. 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.
- groby_b 7mo agoDid they also shut down the bathrooms? You know, to focus the mind? 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. > You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show." I wish more people did. We certainly have an excess supply of shit shows these days.
- reaperducer 7mo agoThat is the worst possible take. Really? You lack imagination.
- z33b 7mo agoThe 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
- ceejayoz 7mo agoI 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. Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.
- xattt 7mo agoI 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. Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.
- bananaflag 7mo agoThey did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-how-nasa-captured-lunar-lift-off https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-...
- xattt 7mo agoWe can send a man to the moon, but we can’t have HD footage of the man going to the moon. /s but not really
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoWe are a pretty quirky species when you think about it. This comment right here is kinda why I love humans so much.
- herodoturtle 7mo agoI’ve read elsewhere that the cut-away during booster separation was intentional given the high risk manoeuvre. If something went wrong / explosion etc, then they wouldn’t want to broadcast it. Something to that effect. I’m paraphrasing someone else.
- _moof 7mo agoDon't they usually manage that by having the broadcast be slightly delayed?
- trompetenaccoun 7mo agoArtemis 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! NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
- meatloaf_man 7mo ago>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! With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??
- trompetenaccoun 7mo agoApollo 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? 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. * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964622000029 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...
- Neywiny 7mo agoYou should compare against Apollo 9, which was 96% as expensive as 11 and much closer in mission profile. Then you don't need to worry about comparisons on simple flyby vs full landing
- PaulKeeble 7mo agoThey 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. 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.
- losteric 7mo agoThat’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.
- merrychristmas1 7mo agoNo, after talking to NASA people, this is just incompetence.
- the_af 7mo agoHow on earth could they skip streaming the final 10 seconds countdown? That's beyond incompetence.
- colechristensen 7mo agoNobody important enough was in charge of the presentation with full context. This, of course, is a bad sign about the reliability of the mission. Folks have been raising serious safety red flags. If the video of the launch goes off that poorly it says things about how in a row their ducks are.
- swyx 7mo agoor, yknow, focusing on astronaut safety was more important than taking care of how things look on tv
- moffkalast 7mo agoMinimum 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.
- ourmandave 7mo agoThey had 4000 people cut in 2025 and big budget cut in 2026. Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.
- whycome 7mo agoIt’s not rocket science, it’s media production/direction.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo ago> missed pan up at lift-off Tilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from "panorama".
- dylan604 7mo agoYeah, but if you've got your phone in portrait mode for the socials, you are panning relative to the the landscape orientation.
- ck2 7mo agoif you haven't seen the footage from someone in a passenger jet nearby, it rocks https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1sagcc1 https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1sagcc1 https://v.redd.it/l11tehzzvrsg1/CMAF_720.mp4 https://v.redd.it/l11tehzzvrsg1/CMAF_720.mp4 Think about how much technology evolved to create that scene, to fly nearby and being used to take that video, wow
- ddtaylor 7mo agoYou can't really see anything in that video. The craft is very small on screen.
- ck2 7mo agoI suppose zoom would have some awe factor But it's awesome enough as is a 100 meter tall spaceship nearly 6 million pounds carrying nearly a million gallons of fuel for nearly 10 million pounds of thrust for JUST eight minutes all that to escape Earth's mighty gravity well pretty freaking amazing to watch even at that distance
- realsharkymark 7mo agoMy first thought is SpaceX and Elon would have done this so much better. I felt I watching the launch through someone's iPhone.
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoSpaceX did it worse for a while, took them some launches to be better
- _moof 7mo agoNASA's public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.
- bentt 7mo agoIt took SpaceX a number of goes to get their camerawork and streaming right. NASA just hasn’t done this frequently enough.
- SergeAx 7mo agoThey have all the footage, just not in real time. We are now seeing it being processed and uploaded.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago> never-before-seen views of “the far side of the Moon“ I guess not counting all the prior "views" that have been recorded since the Apollo missions, including Chinese orbiters which (according to Wikipedia) "scanned the entire Moon in unprecedented detail, generating a high definition 3D map that would provide a reference for future soft landings"
- firesteelrain 7mo agoA more accurate claim would be: never-before-seen in real-time at that fidelity from lunar distance.
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo agoReal time has to be about the most useless factor here. I don’t care if it’s a year delayed, it’s not like I was going to head up there myself.
- wang_li 7mo ago>...it’s not like I was going to head up there myself. You're never going to be able to IPO your space startup with that attitude.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoIt's not even going to be real time anyway, it's delayed a bit less than a couple of seconds ;-)
- venusenvy47 7mo agoThe article talks about the normal blackout window of 40 minutes on the far side. I'm confused about how they will get real time footage from that side. Is there a lunar relay satellite that wasn't mentioned?
- fxtentacle 7mo agoThose were transmitted offline so they didn't have authentic NVENC H264 compression artifacts. Never before have you seen it with 260 Mbps ;) /s
- vibe42 7mo agoNASA's rendering of the flyby: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_flyby_1min_720p30.mp4 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_fly... Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !
- albertzeyer 7mo agoIs that real-time or sped up? This video is about 1 minute. How much real time does it correspond to?
- cloche 7mo agoArtemis II is expected to be behind the moon for about 30-40 minutes. Around half-way in the video you can see Earth pass behind the moon in about 1-2 seconds. So yes, it's sped up considerably by a factor of around 2000x
- bnchrch 7mo agoThis in particular warmed my grumpy heart after the best footage of the launch came from a commercial airliners windows. I had assumed they would've had a better plan to film the entire departure from orbit yesterday. I'm at least happy they have one for the loop around the moon.
- bspammer 7mo agoI think the actual best footage of the launch was from Everyday Astronaut on youtube, including a great shot of the booster separation https://www.youtube.com/live/QOsSRRBMNoc?t=6h49m36s https://www.youtube.com/live/QOsSRRBMNoc?t=6h49m36s
- samschooler 7mo agoHere's another launch video uncut: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWm1pXNAOh6/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWm1pXNAOh6/
- ofcrpls 7mo agoHere is the Engineering Camera Video feed from the horses mouth. https://images-assets.nasa.gov/video/KSC-20260401-MH-AJN01-0001-Artemis_II_Isolated_Launch_Views-M19183/KSC-20260401-MH-AJN01-0001-Artemis_II_Isolated_Launch_Views-M19183~orig.mp4 https://images-assets.nasa.gov/video/KSC-20260401-MH-AJN01-0...
- qingcharles 7mo agoThis was a really neat set of views, thank you.
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoHow does laser communication work with a moving object with 9DoF?!
- sbarre 7mo agoApparently with a gimbal and some fast-moving mirrors. https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communications-terminal-launches-historic-artemis-ii-moon-mission https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...
- beloch 7mo agoIt also helps that laser beams diverge. By the time it gets back to Earth, the diameter of the beam from Artemis is probably several hundred meters, if not several kilometres. Their aim still needs to be fairly precise, but they're not trying to hit a lens with a beam that's still the width of a pencil. They really just need to paint the neighbourhood that NASA's sensors are located in.
- groby_b 7mo ago6 km ([slide show](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250009875/downloads/Optical%20Comm%20for%20Artemis%20II%20Crewed%20Mission.pdf?attachment=true https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250009875/downloads/Op...) with data points and the worst slides government agencies were able to create)
- kotaKat 7mo agoJust like this, a Starlink gimbal being tested for future third party laser comms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoDoesnt look very precise.
- 7mo ago
- yardie 7mo agoA reminder that the illegal DOGE took a chainsaw to NASA personnel last year. If you're disappointed that the feed update wasn't as polished as a SpaceX launch it's because the later has an actual communications and marketing department with a budget.
- sentientslug 7mo agoI really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right time…
- quentindanjou 7mo agoLess budget = less tooling + less competant people So actually, yes, it could have affected it. Did it really? We will never know. Also NASA has less experience in this than SpaceX, hopefully it will be better next time!
- dboreham 7mo agoPresumably they had more than one camera and the fault was with people in the booth.
- yardie 7mo ago> panning up at the right time… I've watched hours of athlete parents try to track their athlete kid and it's marginally useful at best. Lots of shaky cam even at Pop Warner football speeds. So panning at the right time, with the muscle control to keep the object centered, is harder than you think. If they have a professional videographer on staff working that camera it almost certainly would have never happened. Elon, who was in charge of DOGE, didn't take communications and marketing seriously so I'm almost certain they were one of the first to be let go.
- PKop 7mo agoSpaceX coverage is much better! lol This is such nonsense. How much does a professional videographer cost? It's a rounding error given what they spend. It's just bad planning and decision-making. This is a damn mission to the moon, not little league baseball, why would you ever compare the two?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Gagarin1917 7mo agoWhy does the article keep mentioning footage “from the surface of the moon”?
- hartator 7mo agoAI knows what really people want to see.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Cider9986 7mo ago> "will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps..." > "will be used to beam 4K moon footage at up to 260 Mbps." > "Data rates of 260 Mbps can be achieved..." I wonder what size stream will be available to us. The largest I see in general is 70-90 Mbps for a 4k Bluray Remux and that includes lossless audio. I imagine they would want as much data as possible—significantly more than would be visible to the human eye.
- Neywiny 7mo agoHopefully something nice. I don't think I've ever seen a 4k bluray but fine detail such as stars and dirt tend to get disturbed in compression pretty quickly.
- ssl-3 7mo agoFor us, live? Not much -- probably just whatever it is that YouTube provides for. At a glance, that's officially 40Mbps or less. (My anecdotal experience suggests that it is much, much less.) But NASA's own in-house stream probably won't consist of 260 Mbps of video, either. Keeping headroom available during streams is important on packet-switched networks, which I [perhaps erroneously] assume this is. (Later on, after the fact? That's what FOIA requests are for if you want to see every recorded bit. It will certainly come at a price, but if a person wants to compare the received friggin-laser-beams stream to that which the on-board video systems recorded internally, then it should be possible.)
- ethanmacavoy 7mo ago[flagged]
- jascenso 7mo ago260 Mbps for 4K seems to be awfully a lot for a single stream. Really makes me wonder what has been used for compression ...
- dawnerd 7mo agoAlmost for sure would be multiple camera feeds. But also wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a bitrate that high. I had a Sony camera that did 100mbps and that was just a prosumer camera.
- hedgehog 7mo agoFor the raw footage of something with as much contrast as the moon against a backdrop of space it would make sense to use a format like ProRes that preserves more dynamic range.
- rumblefrog 7mo agoThat number is the total bandwidth for the O2O link.
- ck2 7mo agoDidn't Nokia put a 4G cell node up there? Who is going to be the first to make a smartphone call from the moon? Lag won't be too bad, just 1.5 seconds or less
- BenjiWiebe 7mo ago2.2-2.7 seconds of delay due to light speed alone (so maybe a few ms more for electronics and en/decoding).
- danny_codes 7mo agoHopefully it’s not cloudy
- saltybytes 7mo agoForgive my bluntness asking this question: how hard can it be to put a stationary "satellite" as a communication relay next to the moon to bridge the "dark window" with the space craft?
- Insanity 7mo agoWell technical difficulty is one piece. Cost and ROI are a different one.
- sho_hn 7mo agoIt's doable (and has been done), but is not entirely easy or cheap. Without getting into the orbital mechanics/whys, a "geostationary" orbit around the moon is not available (it exists but is further out than the Hill sphere and not stable). You can park a relay semi-stably at Earth-Moon L2, but still need station-keeping burns. The moon has has a very lumpy gravity field, so any kind of orbit needs station-keeping eventually. It's just not super worth it. If you want to look at a mission that did this, see China's Queqiao.
- lexicality 7mo agoOrbital mechanics and "next to" don't go together particularly well, so it's not quite as easy as popping something up there. The Chinese have put Queqiao-1 in the earth-moon L2 point which seems to be working out for them, but I guess the Americans aren't likely to be asking permission to use it.
- _moof 7mo agoWe have DSN already. As for the moon, it is a nightmare to orbit. Its density is very lumpy, which means orbits around it are constantly being perturbed, and that means you need to bring an annoying amount of propellant if you want to remain stable.
- scottburgess33 7mo ago[dead]
- chmorgan_ 7mo ago[dead]
- egberts1 7mo agoStill want to know what happened in first 10 second of launch, why were the videos fuzzy and cutting out (at least twice)????
- runnr_az 7mo agoHow accurate does the laser have to be to hit the base station?
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoThe Alan Parsons Project is going 4K?
- johnea 7mo agoWhat a cluster fuck 8-/ This is how we spend billions of $ and accomplish, nothing. But, at least we'll have 4K, hi-res, laser beam, video of accomplishing nothing. And, we can all look forward to spending even more billions to do nothing on Mars! WTF?!
- johnea 7mo agoManned space flight is the biggest impediment to space science and exploration, both technically and financially.
- screenshotapi 7mo agoThis is amazing. This is a slow burn but live view from Orion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RwfNBtepa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RwfNBtepa4
- ra 7mo agoArtemis II live location: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
- goodthink 7mo agoWith all of the big deal being made about viewing the far side of the moon, you would think they would have performed the mission when the moon is _new_ so the far side would be illuminated...