> Things leave your field a view much faster than anticipated.

Not sure about that. NASA has been using Kineto Tracking Mounts and ROTI (radar-assisted and optical tracking) since 1981. Those systems were developed for the Columbia launch. I find it hard to believe that today's computer-guided cameras would let anything slip out of frame unintentionally.

Hell, you can see it too in the latest F1 movie.

Shots in which the base plate was taken from live footage (crews trained in filming the sport) are stable and show all the action. Shots from Hollywood camera crews can barely keep up.

One may say this is a bad comparison point, and that it was an artistic choice, but I call bullshit on that. So much of the movie was based upon live footage that the ones that didn't just look amateurish.

And yet, both crews are professionals. It is difficult to film these things well.

How on earth could they skip streaming the final 10 seconds countdown? That's beyond incompetence.

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?

Alright, Kif, let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can do

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.

Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.

Was going to say, I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.

And NASA probably does have great video of it available, it’s just the live broadcast that missed it.

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].

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.

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.

What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.

I mean that sounds nice, but the SLS rocket and Orion capsule are nothing new, they’re already outdated.

But yeah NASA is great at many things. Issacman is smart enough to know they don’t need to be in the launch busnieee anymore.

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?

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...

> Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??

Distance isn't the factor. Useful payload to destination and required Delta V are. Leaving earth is 10 km/s. TLI is 4 km/s.

With what money? The budget for it got cut.

I 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

This 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.

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.

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?

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.