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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

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'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.

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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.

Hell, you can see it too in the latest F1 movie.

Shots in which the base plate was taken from live footage (crews trained in filming the sport) are stable and show all the action. Shots from Hollywood camera crews can barely keep up.

One may say this is a bad comparison point, and that it was an artistic choice, but I call bullshit on that. So much of the movie was based upon live footage that the ones that didn't just look amateurish.

And yet, both crews are professionals. It is difficult to film these things well.

Unless you have a really cheap production budget, there are multiple races with each race day being preceded by practice times and qualifiers. There's plenty of time to point a lens and get a feel for the tracking speed. It's not like there's a NASA launch weekly/monthly/annually. So yeah, I'm leaning on just an out of sync crew way more than this "anticipating a bad thing happening" theory

> Things leave your field a view much faster than anticipated.

Not sure about that. NASA has been using Kineto Tracking Mounts and ROTI (radar-assisted and optical tracking) since 1981. Those systems were developed for the Columbia launch. I find it hard to believe that today's computer-guided cameras would let anything slip out of frame unintentionally.

Those cameras are for official NASA archives and study of the launch. Those are not for some webcast live stream. Maybe they can piggy back a live stream camera to it for the next one, but they are not going to dedicate one of those mounts for a live stream camera, and I doubt they'd allow for a tap out of the feed.

The probability that they accidentially missed the booster separation is very low. There is also a clear incentive to cut away in case it fails.

I don't understand the logic people are using to keep repeating this. It's just yet another example of how ideas fester and spread on the internet.

No problem. I can explain it to you.

> The probability that they accidentially missed the booster separation is very low. > There is also a clear incentive to cut away in case it fails.

This is called the "premise" in logic.

"It follows that it is very likely the cut was intentional"

This is the conclusion.

All logical sound arguments are structured like this (otherwise you can come up with any conclusion).

> It's just yet another example of how ideas fester and spread on the internet.

And this is a conclusion without premise.

You're proposing a conspiratorial level intent instead of the much easier and more likely operators not as good at their job as hoped. Occam's razor would suggest you are wrong.

Your premise is no better than Qanon premises that a pizza place had a torture chamber dungeon. Your premise is no better than an interstellar hung of rock floating through the solar system was an spaceship. Your premise is just made up out of thin air with no proof whatsoever.

They spend 2 billion $ on a rocket and can't get a proper camera team? Which then accidentially cuts away the most critical part?

Occam's razor checks out...

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.

Isn't Trump supposed to be the king of spectacle? Why weren't there fighter jets doing low-passes supersonic for each final second?

Alright, Kif, let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can do

What is the current best way to watch the take off? I was out of town and want to watch it with family this weekend in fake/pretend real time, so would love a good YouTube or otherwise source :)

Everyday Astronaut's coverage

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

How on earth could they skip streaming the final 10 seconds countdown? That's beyond incompetence.

Nobody important enough was in charge of the presentation with full context.

This, of course, is a bad sign about the reliability of the mission. Folks have been raising serious safety red flags.

If the video of the launch goes off that poorly it says things about how in a row their ducks are.

or, yknow, focusing on astronaut safety was more important than taking care of how things look on tv

This program has cost nearly $100 billion to date. Yesterday's launch alone accounted for $4.1 billion in direct costs.

Saying "it was either this or that" doesn't make sense at these magnitudes. They could have hired a professional aerospace filming team for a ridiculously overpriced $10 million and it would be an _actual_ rounding error.

If you have to make that trade off you’re already in trouble.

queue the new moon hoax theory

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.

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