I understand funding cuts and all, but this is a once-in-a-generation moment and it’s filmed with no apparent effort whatsoever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they were scared of accidents they could have streamed it with a delay.
Alright, Kif, let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can do
Livestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really should be using KSP for it - it's not hard to wire up with external telemetry, and with couple graphics mods, it looks way 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 directly representing some measurement).
Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.
Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.
https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-...
/s but not really
And NASA probably does have great video of it available, it’s just the live broadcast that missed it.
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! ... https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1313
This was 9 years ago, first droneship landing - https://youtu.be/7pUAydjne5M?t=1642
And this is 18 years ago, their first Falcon1 launch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bET0mRnqxQM
More live video from the ascent than we got on Artemis2 for sure...
The feeling it evoked in me was that a multi billion dollar PR program could surely afford to spend a little bit of money on reliable camera tracking, telemetry overlays, visualisations that run at more than 0.1 FPS, etc.
Absolutely bizarre.
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.
--
[0] - It already happened many times. The step shift of how black holes are portrayed after Interstellar 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.
no? why you think it would ? We know how it looks like already
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.
But the camera quality is so low and I don't get it.
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.
For real?
I was rolling my eyes hard at:
GC systems go?
GC systems go for all for humanity!
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?
Perhaps I enjoy competence over narrative nonsense? Maybe pessimism has been highly undersold this generation and too many people are willing to buy into any basic narrative of emotion nudging they’re shown?
What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.
NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??
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/S026596462...
Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.
I felt I watching the launch through someone's iPhone.
If something went wrong / explosion etc, then they wouldn’t want to broadcast it.
Something to that effect. I’m paraphrasing someone else.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1sagcc1
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
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
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.
something like> It's better to watch the tivestream for DudeFromIowa that usualy has a better coverage than Nasa http://www.youtube.com/whatever .
Let's not foster any more of it.
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."
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.
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.
Tilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from "panorama".
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"
The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.
It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.
I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/a2-reference...
You're never going to be able to IPO your space startup with that attitude.
/s
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.
It's just not super worth it.
If you want to look at a mission that did this, see China's Queqiao.
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.
> "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.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_fly...
Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !
https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...
I generated this visual map about to help me understand it - https://vectree.io/c/aiming-space-lasers-gimbals-and-beam-di...
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
More thorough prep/training for camera operators, so they can pan the camera according to a plan, instead of by reaction.
Maybe this camera operator wasn't supposed to pan because it was trying to capture diagnostic imagery that wasn't really intended for viewers, but because of budget cuts, they opted to use diagnostic views as presentation views.
Maybe there was supposed to be a cut to a different camera. But the production room was not sufficiently staffed to coordinate the switch.
Maybe there was no broadcast plan at all and it wasn't clearly coordinated who should be taking what shots.
Maybe they were underpaying the operators and they were not qualified.
Maybe they were underpaying the operators and a single operator was stuck operating multiple cameras and was framing a different camera at the time.
Automated tracking systems.
Sure, it's very likely that this might have happened anyway, but there are a lot of ways that reducing budget reduces planning and coordination. Especially if there is enough budget squeeze to move funds from public support campaigns (this entire stream was a public support campaign) to critical things (like building a rocket).
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.
- No professional videographer was part of the staff?
- They were fired/cut by DOGE on behalf of Elon Musk?
Absent any other evidence, wouldn't it make more sense to simply assume that there was at least one professional videographer on staff, and an entire professional video team, but they just weren't very good/effective for a variety of reasons unrelated to Elon Musk?
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!
Tilting is up and down.
Panning is left to right.
You can't pan up, unless you've fallen over.
However: That quality was lost earlier than last year. Not sure exactly when, but it been like this for years now.