[HN Gopher] Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K mo...
___________________________________________________________________
Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at
260 Mbps
Author : speckx
Score : 308 points
Date : 2026-04-02 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| xattt wrote:
| 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.
| piyh wrote:
| 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.
| therouwboat wrote:
| maybe they should turn back and do it again
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| We've already seen what happens when you allow social
| media types to infect the government.
|
| Let's not foster any more of it.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if they were actually competent in what
| they do.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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 ._
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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."
| ssl-3 wrote:
| So an organization as large as NASA can either walk, or
| chew gum -- but cannot do both at the same time?
| unregistereddev wrote:
| 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.
| groby_b wrote:
| 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.
| z33b wrote:
| 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
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| 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.
| bananaflag wrote:
| They did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off
|
| https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-
| computing/item/2742-...
| xattt wrote:
| 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
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| We are a pretty quirky species when you think about it.
| This comment right here is kinda why I love humans so
| much.
| shemtay wrote:
| 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.
| fredoralive wrote:
| 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).
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| SpaceX had a lot of rough footage before they figured it
| out and they have many more tries to correct it
| hparadiz wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > 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...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > 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?
| daveguy wrote:
| 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?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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?
| mylies43 wrote:
| 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
| daveguy wrote:
| 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?
| reaperducer wrote:
| What NASA does goes in the history books.
|
| What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| They literally played clips from actors in recent moon
| movies so yes, they definitely were taking notes from
| movies.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > 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
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Knowing is one thing, seeing is another. Art - and
| general population - is more receptive to the latter.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| Don't they usually manage that by having the broadcast be
| slightly delayed?
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| 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.
| meatloaf_man wrote:
| >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??
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| 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/S026596
| 462...
| Neywiny wrote:
| 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
| themafia wrote:
| > 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.)
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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.
| Rover222 wrote:
| 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.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 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.
| losteric wrote:
| 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.
| merrychristmas1 wrote:
| No, after talking to NASA people, this is just incompetence.
| the_af wrote:
| How on earth could they skip streaming the final 10 seconds
| countdown? That's beyond incompetence.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| or, yknow, focusing on astronaut safety was more
| important than taking care of how things look on tv
| conorcleary wrote:
| queue the new moon hoax theory
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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_
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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 :)
| dingaling wrote:
| Everyday Astronaut's coverage
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| spookie wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| grvbck wrote:
| > 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| ourmandave wrote:
| They had 4000 people cut in 2025 and big budget cut in 2026.
|
| Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Why isn't NASA hiring a normal production company?
| _moof wrote:
| With what money? The budget for it got cut.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| NASA had roughly $3B to spend on this specific part of
| production.
| whycome wrote:
| It's not rocket science, it's media production/direction.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > missed pan up at lift-off
|
| Tilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from
| "panorama".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, but if you've got your phone in portrait mode for the
| socials, you are panning relative to the the landscape
| orientation.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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
| ddtaylor wrote:
| You can't really see anything in that video. The craft is
| very small on screen.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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
| realsharkymark wrote:
| My first thought is SpaceX and Elon would have done this so
| much better.
|
| I felt I watching the launch through someone's iPhone.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| SpaceX did it worse for a while, took them some launches to
| be better
| _moof wrote:
| NASA's public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.
| bentt wrote:
| It took SpaceX a number of goes to get their camerawork and
| streaming right. NASA just hasn't done this frequently enough.
| SergeAx wrote:
| They have all the footage, just not in real time. We are now
| seeing it being processed and uploaded.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > 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"
| firesteelrain wrote:
| A more accurate claim would be: never-before-seen in real-time
| at that fidelity from lunar distance.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| wang_li wrote:
| >...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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| It's not even going to be real time anyway, it's delayed a
| bit less than a couple of seconds ;-)
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| 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?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Those were transmitted offline so they didn't have authentic
| NVENC H264 compression artifacts. Never before have you seen it
| with 260 Mbps ;)
|
| /s
| procflora wrote:
| 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...
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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.
| procflora wrote:
| 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).
| vibe42 wrote:
| 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 !
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Is that real-time or sped up? This video is about 1 minute. How
| much real time does it correspond to?
| cloche wrote:
| 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
| bnchrch wrote:
| 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.
| bspammer wrote:
| 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
| samschooler wrote:
| Here's another launch video uncut:
| https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWm1pXNAOh6/
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| How does laser communication work with a moving object with
| 9DoF?!
| sbarre wrote:
| Apparently with a gimbal and some fast-moving mirrors.
|
| https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...
| beloch wrote:
| 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.
| groby_b wrote:
| 6 km ([slide show](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/2025
| 0009875/downloads/Op...) with data points and the worst
| slides government agencies were able to create)
| kotaKat wrote:
| Just like this, a Starlink gimbal being tested for future third
| party laser comms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Doesnt look very precise.
| functional_dev wrote:
| 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...
| yardie wrote:
| 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.
| sentientslug wrote:
| I really don't think budget cuts prevented the camera operator
| from panning up at the right time...
| quentindanjou wrote:
| 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!
| dboreham wrote:
| Presumably they had more than one camera and the fault was
| with people in the booth.
| yardie wrote:
| > 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.
| PKop wrote:
| 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?
| tredre3 wrote:
| 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?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| bisby wrote:
| 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).
| lysace wrote:
| 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.
| PKop wrote:
| 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?
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Jared could have reached out to Everyday Astronaut and probably
| gotten his crew to do it just for the shoutouts on the official
| stream.
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| Why does the article keep mentioning footage "from the surface of
| the moon"?
| hartator wrote:
| AI knows what really people want to see.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| > "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.
| Neywiny wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| ethanmacavoy wrote:
| the writeup is helpful but i'd want to see how it handles edge
| cases
| jascenso wrote:
| 260 Mbps for 4K seems to be awfully a lot for a single stream.
| Really makes me wonder what has been used for compression ...
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| hedgehog wrote:
| 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.
| rumblefrog wrote:
| That number is the total bandwidth for the O2O link.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| 2.2-2.7 seconds of delay due to light speed alone (so maybe a
| few ms more for electronics and en/decoding).
| danny_codes wrote:
| Hopefully it's not cloudy
| saltybytes wrote:
| 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?
| Insanity wrote:
| Well technical difficulty is one piece. Cost and ROI are a
| different one.
| sho_hn wrote:
| 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.
| lexicality wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Still want to know what happened in first 10 second of launch,
| why were the videos fuzzy and cutting out (at least twice)????
| runnr_az wrote:
| How accurate does the laser have to be to hit the base station?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The Alan Parsons Project is going 4K?
| johnea wrote:
| 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?!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-02 23:01 UTC)