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Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

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Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#41

Post by xattt »

ceejayoz wrote: post #15
z33b wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#42

Post by trompetenaccoun »

xattt wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#43

Post by bspammer »

bnchrch wrote: post #5

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

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#44

Post by PaulKeeble »

xattt wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#45

Post by unregistereddev »

reaperducer wrote: post #27
piyh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#46

Post by bananaflag »

xattt wrote: post #41
ceejayoz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#47

Post by TeMPOraL »

IshKebab wrote: post #30
z33b wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#48

Post by losteric »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #44
xattt wrote: post #2

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, it…

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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#49

Post by moffkalast »

xattt wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

#50

Post by PKop »

yardie wrote: post #11

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.

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?
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