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Hopefully, 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 al
by xattt 7mo ago
Hopefully, 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.