speckxArtemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps
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.
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
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."
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.
> 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?
What NASA does goes in the history books.
What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.
> 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’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.
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.
> 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"
A more accurate claim would be: never-before-seen in real-time at that fidelity from lunar distance.
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.
Those were transmitted offline so they didn't have authentic NVENC H264 compression artifacts. Never before have you seen it with 260 Mbps ;)
/s
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.
Why does the article keep mentioning footage “from the surface of the moon”?