/s

Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

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.

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?

What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.

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.

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."

Let's not foster any more of it.

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.)

It's just not super worth it.

If you want to look at a mission that did this, see China's Queqiao.

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.

I generated this visual map about to help me understand it - https://vectree.io/c/aiming-space-lasers-gimbals-and-beam-di...

https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...

However: That quality was lost earlier than last year. Not sure exactly when, but it been like this for years now.

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).

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!

Tilting is up and down.

Panning is left to right.

You can't pan up, unless you've fallen over.

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.

- 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?