81–90 of 161 posts
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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.
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.
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> NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form For real? I was rolling my eyes hard at: GC systems go? GC systems go for all for humanity! 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?
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?
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?
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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 tha…
>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??
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...
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?
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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-...
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 just not super worth it.
If you want to look at a mission that did this, see China's Queqiao.
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?
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.
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I really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right 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. Elo…
- 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?
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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?