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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.

No, after talking to NASA people, this is just incompetence.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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!

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?

>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??

Why isn't NASA hiring a normal production company?

SpaceX did it worse for a while, took them some launches to be better

You can't really see anything in that video. The craft is very small on screen.

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."

Don't they usually manage that by having the broadcast be slightly delayed?

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.

Here's another launch video uncut: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWm1pXNAOh6/

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

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.

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).

> 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.

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!

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.

Presumably they had more than one camera and the fault was with people in the booth.