Clearly, you&#x27;ve never worked with a live video crew. If they have no practice, it&#x27;s amazing how bad you can appear with a lack of appreciation of how fast things move. You also have to remember the camera&#x2F;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&#x2F;viewfinders.I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t get their shit together? The spectacle is important for public support!I still don&#x27;t understand why they didn&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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.

&gt; Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for itLivestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really should be using KSP for it - it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t show anything that isn&#x27;t directly representing some measurement).

I suspect this is a frequency thing. Early SpaceX broadcasts were pretty rough. NASA just doesn&#x27;t do launch coverage with the same sort of cadence.Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

&gt; 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.

&gt; NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over formFor real?I was rolling my eyes hard at:<pre><code> GC systems go?

 GC systems go for all for humanity!
</code></pre>
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?

Even SpaceX is only okay with their broadcasts. They normalized showing very little data and spending the whole time with talking heads that don&#x27;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&#x27;t get it.It seems like the entire industry has just ignored the lessons of old: &quot;Get someone who does this for a living&quot;. They should have connections and partnerships with movie companies who actually know how to run cameras. That shouldn&#x27;t be expensive nowadays, as that knowledge seems to be cheap enough for Youtube creators.

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

&gt;For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that&#x27;s a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn&#x27;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??

Artemis has a budget of over 90 billion dollars, it&#x27;s more than 4 billion for that Artemis II launch (as estimated by NASA, possibly more because they don&#x27;t even know exactly how much they&#x27;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&#x27;s a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn&#x27;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.

It took SpaceX a number of goes to get their camerawork and streaming right. NASA just hasn’t done this frequently enough.

NASA&#x27;s public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.

Why isn&#x27;t NASA hiring a normal production company?

They had 4000 people cut in 2025 and big budget cut in 2026.Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.

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

My first thought is SpaceX and Elon would have done this so much better.I felt I watching the launch through someone&#x27;s iPhone.

It’s not rocket science, it’s media production&#x2F;direction.

You can&#x27;t really see anything in that video. The craft is very small on screen.

if you haven&#x27;t seen the footage from someone in a passenger jet nearby, it rocks<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aviation&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1sagcc1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aviation&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1sagcc1</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v.redd.it&#x2F;l11tehzzvrsg1&#x2F;CMAF_720.mp4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v.redd.it&#x2F;l11tehzzvrsg1&#x2F;CMAF_720.mp4</a>Think about how much technology evolved to create that scene, to fly nearby and being used to take that video, wow

Minimum effort has always been NASA&#x27;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.

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 &quot;shit show.&quot;

Crazy that a dude from Iowa and his ragtag group of rocket watchers does a better job with launch coverage than NASA. I can&#x27;t believe they cut away during booster separation. Absolute shit show.

Yeah, but if you&#x27;ve got your phone in portrait mode for the socials, you are panning relative to the the landscape orientation.

&gt; missed pan up at lift-offTilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from &quot;panorama&quot;.

Don&#x27;t they usually manage that by having the broadcast be slightly delayed?

I’ve read elsewhere that the cut-away during booster separation was intentional given the high risk manoeuvre.If something went wrong &#x2F; explosion etc, then they wouldn’t want to broadcast it.Something to that effect. I’m paraphrasing someone else.

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.

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&#x27;s how physics works. So they&#x27;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.

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 &amp; rover have taken photos of the far side.It also states that these will be images &quot;from the surface&quot; of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;in the lunar vicinity&quot; at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a &quot;livestream&quot; is just misstated.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;a2-reference-guide-012825.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;a2-reference...</a>

The article talks about the normal blackout window of 40 minutes on the far side. I&#x27;m confused about how they will get real time footage from that side. Is there a lunar relay satellite that wasn&#x27;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.

A more accurate claim would be: never-before-seen in real-time at that fidelity from lunar distance.

Those were transmitted offline so they didn&#x27;t have authentic NVENC H264 compression artifacts. Never before have you seen it with 260 Mbps ;)&#x2F;s

&gt; never-before-seen views of “the far side of the Moon“I guess not counting all the prior &quot;views&quot; that have been recorded since the Apollo missions, including Chinese orbiters which (according to Wikipedia) &quot;scanned the entire Moon in unprecedented detail, generating a high definition 3D map that would provide a reference for future soft landings&quot;

Here&#x27;s another launch video uncut: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.instagram.com&#x2F;reel&#x2F;DWm1pXNAOh6&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.instagram.com&#x2F;reel&#x2F;DWm1pXNAOh6&#x2F;</a>

I think the actual best footage of the launch was from Everyday Astronaut on youtube, including a great shot of the booster separation<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;QOsSRRBMNoc?t=6h49m36s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;QOsSRRBMNoc?t=6h49m36s</a>

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&#x27;ve had a better plan to film the entire departure from orbit yesterday.I&#x27;m at least happy they have one for the loop around the moon.

It&#x27;s doable (and has been done), but is not entirely easy or cheap. Without getting into the orbital mechanics&#x2F;whys, a &quot;geostationary&quot; 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&#x27;s just not super worth it.If you want to look at a mission that did this, see China&#x27;s Queqiao.

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.

Orbital mechanics and &quot;next to&quot; don&#x27;t go together particularly well, so it&#x27;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&#x27;t likely to be asking permission to use it.

Well technical difficulty is one piece. Cost and ROI are a different one.

Forgive my bluntness asking this question: how hard can it be to put a stationary &quot;satellite&quot; as a communication relay next to the moon to bridge the &quot;dark window&quot; with the space craft?

How accurate does the laser have to be to hit the base station?

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&#x27;s sped up considerably by a factor of around 2000x

Is that real-time or sped up? This video is about 1 minute. How much real time does it correspond to?

NASA&#x27;s rendering of the flyby:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;svs.gsfc.nasa.gov&#x2F;vis&#x2F;a000000&#x2F;a005500&#x2F;a005536&#x2F;a2_flyby_1min_720p30.mp4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;svs.gsfc.nasa.gov&#x2F;vis&#x2F;a000000&#x2F;a005500&#x2F;a005536&#x2F;a2_fly...</a>Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !

Hopefully something nice. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a 4k bluray but fine detail such as stars and dirt tend to get disturbed in compression pretty quickly.

&gt; &quot;will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps...&quot;&gt; &quot;will be used to beam 4K moon footage at up to 260 Mbps.&quot;&gt; &quot;Data rates of 260 Mbps can be achieved...&quot;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.

Why does the article keep mentioning footage “from the surface of the moon”?

Still want to know what happened in first 10 second of launch, why were the videos fuzzy and cutting out (at least twice)????

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.

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.

260 Mbps for 4K seems to be awfully a lot for a single stream. Really makes me wonder what has been used for compression ...

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&#x27;re not trying to hit a lens with a beam that&#x27;s still the width of a pencil. They really just need to paint the neighbourhood that NASA&#x27;s sensors are located in.

Apparently with a gimbal and some fast-moving mirrors.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ll.mit.edu&#x2F;news&#x2F;lincoln-laboratory-laser-communications-terminal-launches-historic-artemis-ii-moon-mission" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ll.mit.edu&#x2F;news&#x2F;lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...</a>

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 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vectree.io&#x2F;c&#x2F;aiming-space-lasers-gimbals-and-beam-divergence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vectree.io&#x2F;c&#x2F;aiming-space-lasers-gimbals-and-beam-di...</a>

Just like this, a Starlink gimbal being tested for future third party laser comms: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs</a>

How does laser communication work with a moving object with 9DoF?!

2.2-2.7 seconds of delay due to light speed alone (so maybe a few ms more for electronics and en&#x2F;decoding).

Didn&#x27;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&#x27;t be too bad, just 1.5 seconds or less

the writeup is helpful but i&#x27;d want to see how it handles edge cases

There are plenty of ways that money could have solved this though.More thorough prep&#x2F;training for camera operators, so they can pan the camera according to a plan, instead of by reaction.Maybe this camera operator wasn&#x27;t supposed to pan because it was trying to capture diagnostic imagery that wasn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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).

&gt; panning up at the right time…I&#x27;ve watched hours of athlete parents try to track their athlete kid and it&#x27;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&#x27;t take communications and marketing seriously so I&#x27;m almost certain they were one of the first to be let go.

Less budget = less tooling + less competant peopleSo 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 timeTilting is up and down.Panning is left to right.You can&#x27;t pan up, unless you&#x27;ve fallen over.

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

I really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right time…

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.

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?

A reminder that the illegal DOGE took a chainsaw to NASA personnel last year. If you&#x27;re disappointed that the feed update wasn&#x27;t as polished as a SpaceX launch it&#x27;s because the later has an actual communications and marketing department with a budget.

Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps