> 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"
This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.
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.
But Artemis II launched during passover - so a day before the full moon. That means that for a 10 day mission, the flyby will be four days after the full moon. And the flyby is necessarily on the far side of the moon, that's how physics works. So they'll be passing over the far side of the moon four days after a full moon - the far side of the moon will be in almost complete darkness. Not even Earthshine lights the dark side of the moon when it is full.
My understanding is that even that small amount is more than the Apollo crews had. It's all a bit of a marketing line anyway. We can see a good portion of the "far side" from Earth due to the Moon's libration.
Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).
I believe that Apollo 17 spent six days in lunar orbit. I'm not sure at what phase they arrived or left, but worst case they saw the far side three days away from full darkness.
The 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?
Artemis 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Those cameras are for official NASA archives and study of the launch. Those are not for some webcast live stream. Maybe they can piggy back a live stream camera to it for the next one, but they are not going to dedicate one of those mounts for a live stream camera, and I doubt they'd allow for a tap out of the feed.
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.
Unless you have a really cheap production budget, there are multiple races with each race day being preceded by practice times and qualifiers. There's plenty of time to point a lens and get a feel for the tracking speed. It's not like there's a NASA launch weekly/monthly/annually. So yeah, I'm leaning on just an out of sync crew way more than this "anticipating a bad thing happening" theory
This program has cost nearly $100 billion to date. Yesterday's launch alone accounted for $4.1 billion in direct costs.
Saying "it was either this or that" doesn't make sense at these magnitudes. They could have hired a professional aerospace filming team for a ridiculously overpriced $10 million and it would be an _actual_ rounding error.
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!
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.
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 :)
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
> 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
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).
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.
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).
Okay but the live stream for YouTube used a dslr live feed which I guess they didn't tell the camera operator for lift off because they started to snap still shots and the video feed had a visible shutter and then still frame for 1 second in the video feed. So to reiterate the official nasa YouTube stream ruined the lift off video stream.
> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.
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
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.
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.
> 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].
no? why you think it would ? We know how it looks like already
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?
I didn’t realize an eye roll and considering that they’re LARPing themselves for theatrical effect… was “getting bent out of shape”.
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?
I mean are they really larping? They are mission control for NASA seems like if anyone is going to giving dramatic pre-launch sentiments they would be the ones
They had one part - literally one line - of a scripted and serious safety checklist where they could express themselves. Some chose to be kinda muted, some chose to be kinda over the top. Maybe get over yourself?
Around when they resume the count down at 10 min, the blonde woman with the super curved monitor breaks into her best Apollo Themed inspirational speech… shit, if she went on any longer she was about to say how this was one small step for man…
Again… IT IS COOL… but remind WHY on all the theatrics if you would. We put more than a dozen men on the moon, right? Why is fly once around it 60 years later that big of a deal?
It’s OK to say “They were trying to be fun and inspiring but yes it came off a little cheesy because they’re nerds.”
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.
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.
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!
NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
From what I have heard, the standard rebuttal to NASA expense is that they are ploughing money into the ground to grow new things the hard way.
The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.
NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.
>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??
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.
You 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
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
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.
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.
Crazy 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."
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.
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.
Forgive 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?
It'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.
Orbital 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.
We 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.
> "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.
For 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.)
Hopefully 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.
A 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.
There are plenty of ways that money could have solved this though.
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.
You've made it very clear that you hate Elon and DOGE, but what you have not made very clear is what are your sources to say that:
- 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?
SpaceX 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?
I remember NASA broadcasts being top notch up until the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. That stabilized footage from when the shuttle was landing is iconic.
However: That quality was lost earlier than last year. Not sure exactly when, but it been like this for years now.
This is nonsense excuse making. Regardless of how much money you want NASA to have, are you not yourself upset that the billions they do get were not sufficient to use cameras correctly? How much money do you think it costs to do this right?
Almost 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.
For 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.
It 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.
This 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.
I 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
Here's another launch video uncut: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWm1pXNAOh6/
Artemis II live location: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
> 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"
This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.
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...
But Artemis II launched during passover - so a day before the full moon. That means that for a 10 day mission, the flyby will be four days after the full moon. And the flyby is necessarily on the far side of the moon, that's how physics works. So they'll be passing over the far side of the moon four days after a full moon - the far side of the moon will be in almost complete darkness. Not even Earthshine lights the dark side of the moon when it is full.
My understanding is that even that small amount is more than the Apollo crews had. It's all a bit of a marketing line anyway. We can see a good portion of the "far side" from Earth due to the Moon's libration.
Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).
I believe that Apollo 17 spent six days in lunar orbit. I'm not sure at what phase they arrived or left, but worst case they saw the far side three days away from full darkness.
A more accurate claim would be: never-before-seen in real-time at that fidelity from lunar distance.
The 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?
Real 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.
It's not even going to be real time anyway, it's delayed a bit less than a couple of seconds ;-)
>...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.
Those were transmitted offline so they didn't have authentic NVENC H264 compression artifacts. Never before have you seen it with 260 Mbps ;)
/s
NASA's rendering of the flyby:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_fly...
Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !
Is that real-time or sped up? This video is about 1 minute. How much real time does it correspond to?
Artemis 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
This is amazing. This is a slow burn but live view from Orion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RwfNBtepa4
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Those cameras are for official NASA archives and study of the launch. Those are not for some webcast live stream. Maybe they can piggy back a live stream camera to it for the next one, but they are not going to dedicate one of those mounts for a live stream camera, and I doubt they'd allow for a tap out of the feed.
The probability that they accidentially missed the booster separation is very low. There is also a clear incentive to cut away in case it fails.
I don't understand the logic people are using to keep repeating this. It's just yet another example of how ideas fester and spread on the internet.
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.
Unless you have a really cheap production budget, there are multiple races with each race day being preceded by practice times and qualifiers. There's plenty of time to point a lens and get a feel for the tracking speed. It's not like there's a NASA launch weekly/monthly/annually. So yeah, I'm leaning on just an out of sync crew way more than this "anticipating a bad thing happening" theory
No, after talking to NASA people, this is just incompetence.
How on earth could they skip streaming the final 10 seconds countdown? That's beyond incompetence.
Nobody 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.
or, yknow, focusing on astronaut safety was more important than taking care of how things look on tv
If you have to make that trade off you’re already in trouble.
This program has cost nearly $100 billion to date. Yesterday's launch alone accounted for $4.1 billion in direct costs.
Saying "it was either this or that" doesn't make sense at these magnitudes. They could have hired a professional aerospace filming team for a ridiculously overpriced $10 million and it would be an _actual_ rounding error.
queue the new moon hoax theory
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!
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.
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 :)
Everyday Astronaut's coverage
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
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
> 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
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).
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.
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.
Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.
They did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off
https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-...
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.
/s but not really
We are a pretty quirky species when you think about it. This comment right here is kinda why I love humans so much.
SpaceX had a lot of rough footage before they figured it out and they have many more tries to correct it
Okay but the live stream for YouTube used a dslr live feed which I guess they didn't tell the camera operator for lift off because they started to snap still shots and the video feed had a visible shutter and then still frame for 1 second in the video feed. So to reiterate the official nasa YouTube stream ruined the lift off video stream.
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.
> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.
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...
> evoke a feeling of substance over form...
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.
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.
> 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].
no? why you think it would ? We know how it looks like already
Knowing is one thing, seeing is another. Art - and general population - is more receptive to the latter.
> NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form
For real?
I was rolling my eyes hard at:
And then the VERY scripted pre-launch speeches. It’s like everyone there had been taking notes from inspirational hero movies.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?
I didn’t realize an eye roll and considering that they’re LARPing themselves for theatrical effect… was “getting bent out of shape”.
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?
I mean are they really larping? They are mission control for NASA seems like if anyone is going to giving dramatic pre-launch sentiments they would be the ones
They had one part - literally one line - of a scripted and serious safety checklist where they could express themselves. Some chose to be kinda muted, some chose to be kinda over the top. Maybe get over yourself?
Around when they resume the count down at 10 min, the blonde woman with the super curved monitor breaks into her best Apollo Themed inspirational speech… shit, if she went on any longer she was about to say how this was one small step for man…
Again… IT IS COOL… but remind WHY on all the theatrics if you would. We put more than a dozen men on the moon, right? Why is fly once around it 60 years later that big of a deal?
It’s OK to say “They were trying to be fun and inspiring but yes it came off a little cheesy because they’re nerds.”
What NASA does goes in the history books.
What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.
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.
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.
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!
NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.
From what I have heard, the standard rebuttal to NASA expense is that they are ploughing money into the ground to grow new things the hard way.
The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.
NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.
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.
>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??
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...
You 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
> 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.
Obligatory link to old reddit graphic https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ekgm2g/i_made_a_delt...
It does not have the ISS, but IIUC it's slightly over "Low Earth Orbit".
(I'd love to see one where the distances are draw proportional to Delta V.)
They had 4000 people cut in 2025 and big budget cut in 2026.
Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.
Why isn't NASA hiring a normal production company?
With what money? The budget for it got cut.
NASA had roughly $3B to spend on this specific part of production.
NASA's public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.
It took SpaceX a number of goes to get their camerawork and streaming right. NASA just hasn’t done this frequently enough.
It’s not rocket science, it’s media production/direction.
My first thought is SpaceX and Elon would have done this so much better.
I felt I watching the launch through someone's iPhone.
SpaceX did it worse for a while, took them some launches to be better
if you haven't seen the footage from someone in a passenger jet nearby, it rocks
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
You can't really see anything in that video. The craft is very small on screen.
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
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.
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:
something like> It's better to watch the tivestream for DudeFromIowa that usualy has a better coverage than Nasa http://www.youtube.com/whatever .
We've already seen what happens when you allow social media types to infect the government.
Let's not foster any more of it.
I wouldn't mind if they were actually competent in what they do.
Crazy 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."
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.
That is the worst possible take.
Really? You lack imagination.
They have all the footage, just not in real time. We are now seeing it being processed and uploaded.
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.
> missed pan up at lift-off
Tilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from "panorama".
Yeah, but if you've got your phone in portrait mode for the socials, you are panning relative to the the landscape orientation.
I’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.
Don't they usually manage that by having the broadcast be slightly delayed?
Forgive 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?
It'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.
Orbital 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.
We 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.
Well technical difficulty is one piece. Cost and ROI are a different one.
Why does the article keep mentioning footage “from the surface of the moon”?
AI knows what really people want to see.
> "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.
For 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.)
Hopefully 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.
The Alan Parsons Project is going 4K?
A 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.
I really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right time…
There are plenty of ways that money could have solved this though.
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).
Less 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!
> 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.
You've made it very clear that you hate Elon and DOGE, but what you have not made very clear is what are your sources to say that:
- 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?
SpaceX 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?
Presumably they had more than one camera and the fault was with people in the booth.
I really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right time
Tilting is up and down.
Panning is left to right.
You can't pan up, unless you've fallen over.
Jared could have reached out to Everyday Astronaut and probably gotten his crew to do it just for the shoutouts on the official stream.
I remember NASA broadcasts being top notch up until the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. That stabilized footage from when the shuttle was landing is iconic.
However: That quality was lost earlier than last year. Not sure exactly when, but it been like this for years now.
This is nonsense excuse making. Regardless of how much money you want NASA to have, are you not yourself upset that the billions they do get were not sufficient to use cameras correctly? How much money do you think it costs to do this right?
Still want to know what happened in first 10 second of launch, why were the videos fuzzy and cutting out (at least twice)????
260 Mbps for 4K seems to be awfully a lot for a single stream. Really makes me wonder what has been used for compression ...
Almost 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.
For 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.
That number is the total bandwidth for the O2O link.
How accurate does the laser have to be to hit the base station?
Hopefully it’s not cloudy
How does laser communication work with a moving object with 9DoF?!
Apparently with a gimbal and some fast-moving mirrors.
https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...
It 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.
6 km ([slide show](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250009875/downloads/Op...) with data points and the worst slides government agencies were able to create)
I was wondering about this too! I did not know how they can aim a laser from so far at a moving spaceship.
I generated this visual map about to help me understand it - https://vectree.io/c/aiming-space-lasers-gimbals-and-beam-di...
Just like this, a Starlink gimbal being tested for future third party laser comms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs
Doesnt look very precise.
Didn'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
2.2-2.7 seconds of delay due to light speed alone (so maybe a few ms more for electronics and en/decoding).
the writeup is helpful but i'd want to see how it handles edge cases
What 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?!