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Shuttle Cameras Yield Excellent Footage

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mr-griffin's-wild-ride dept.

Jivecat writes "All those extra cameras NASA has added to the Space Shuttle to watch for debris impacts have yielded what may be the coolest Shuttle launch footage ever. The forward-facing view from the right-hand SRB shows, at about the 2:58 mark, booster separation and Discovery zooming away. Other views are available at the main mission site."

4 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Re:excellent webcam quality by ZachPruckowski · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does your webcam do that at Mach 25? How about at very high (hundreds or thousands of degrees F.) of heat? Something tells me the quality of your webcam suffers (ie, it melts) in those sorts of situations...

  2. worth watching by Speare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For the one video linked, I'm amazed it didn't get slashdotted immediately. Very interesting to watch the launch sequence. At 3 min, I thought it was getting a bit boring, but wondered what else was interesting in the rest of the footage. At about 8 min, it got interesting again, with the very quick transition from "over the clouds" to "underwater". Not much new to see after 9 min though.

    I do wish my webcam could deal with that wide a range of operating environments though! You quickly forget the engineering that goes into something as simple as a camera housing.

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    1. Re:worth watching by Alizarin+Erythrosin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Its all running a little slow now...

      Anyways, if you haven't seen it yet, check out the right SRB looking-down-o-cam. Great shot of the shadow of the smoke trail, and as the main orbiter engines light off you can see the whole orbiter start to press up on the structure. Then the explosive bolts blow and the boosters rip to life. Very cool.

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  3. Re:Sounds like by displaced80 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Has this stuff really become that run-of-the-mill to you?

    There's been over 100 successful shuttle missions. Every single one of these is astonishing to me, even though I may agree with plenty of the criticisms of the programme. There's a visceral joy in seeing these things do their stuff -- ageing, expensive and cumbersome though they may be.

    I cannot for a second understand how [i]anything[/i] to do with spaceflight -- even the simplest satellite deployment -- could be classed as mundane.

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