alt Hacker NewsThe 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
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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.
> 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?
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.
> 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).