"Best of the Best" Provides New Views, Commentary of Shuttle Launches

hi I'm Matt MELAS I'm an aerospace engineer for NASA and I worked on the shuttle program for a good number of years and I'm here with my colleague today Kevin Burke who participated in the acquisition and deployment of the 30 or so clips that you're going to see in just a few minutes now in Kevin thanks for being here today glad to be here Matt what you're going to see is what I consider to be the best of the best state-of-the-art imagery on both film and high-definition video that the space shuttle program is capable of producing today and not only does it serve a technical purpose and we'll get into a lot of that detail as we get into the the movies here but it also serves as an enormous inspirational and educational aspect for for all of NASA stakeholders there's a number of intents that we have for this production and one of them is to pay tribute and commemorate the shuttle program which has essentially been a 30-year program and it's nearing completion as we go to final print with this production we also want to pay tribute to the men and women that made all of this imagery possible over the years of different missions and launches that we've had and also to give a view that not very many people see outside the NASA family of these fantastic pictures that are used largely for engineering purposes and to let everyone on the outside of the NASA family have insight is to to what goes on with the shuttle when it launches I think this is a very moving set of clips that you're about to see we're opening here with this somewhat stylized view of one of the launch sequences that actually is going to play out in the in the upcoming clips and I've got a little soft focus on it and thought we would open it up with a couple of fun facts about the shuttle it really is an amazing piece of equipment has phenomenal amount of fuel that it burns over the eight minutes during its trip to orbit and when they get up there in that short eight minutes they're going about five miles a second which is a pretty spectacular achievement for a piece of machinery so this is how it all happens this is how that the the machine does its job and the film speaks volumes this is camera view p19 we commonly refer to this as echo 19 and it's a 16 millimeter camera with a 10 millimeter field of view for the lens the focal length of the lens and it's running at 400 frames a second so the effective shutter speed is really 1 1 12 hundredths of a second yeah that's it's pretty amazing I mean this is all a slow-motion event and basically you're going to see the 6 seconds prior to launch of the vehicle is the Space Shuttle main engines turn on now the purpose of this camera they all have different purposes these most of these if not all of these cameras that you're going to see in this production are engineering cameras to look for different engineering aspects of the launch process and so the purpose of this one is to check to make sure ignition is going off ok which is what you're seeing here main engine start is just happening and you can see the engines are starting one at a time this particular camera looks at engines number 1 and 3 right is that what this is yeah and and so you can see they're starting to fire up those sparkers that you see are there to make sure that any unburned hydrogen gets ignited before it floats around and collects in some place where it can ignite later and cause problems again you're seeing the engines sort of turn on here and so we're roughly coming into about 5 seconds before liftoff the computers are checking and validating that everything's a-okay and there's a little bit of a pitch over that the whole vehicle does is a consequence of these these engines thrusting off the center of gravity and when the whole vehicle snaps back and is straight up in the air the engines or the boosters ignite and the whole thing takes off great great photography here I mean you can see all this flow phenomenon going on inside the engines now the Space Shuttle main engines are burning hydrogen and oxygen and I'll talk about some of the fun facts about that later on some of the other clips that you're going to see but here you can see the engines have stabilized and everything is a-okay and in just a few moments you'll see the Boosters fire off did we talk about the time quote I can't remember so no we haven't talked about the time code the time code that you'll see the LED display and the right hand side is actually positioned between the two sprockets on the 16 millimeter frame and the time code is UTC timecode is an IRB format and you'll see that it's 21 hours so being UTC at a 502 p.m. local time 2 minutes 11 seconds and the three digits that are moving in the upper right hand corner would be representing a thousandth of a second the solid number one the second digit from the top is indicating the synchronization of the cameras is more of a technical parameter and that is on every camera to synchronize the field of view live secure synchronized the time this is pretty cool you can see some of the oxygen that that cloud of vapor there was from the oxygen field umbilical of course the solid rocket boosters have now ignited there the whole vehicle is lifting off the pad and you can see sort of the glory of this moment I mean there's an enormous amount of fuel being burned one little thing that I love is if you look at the sky in the background this was a very clear day these pictures were selected or these movies were selected because of the the wonderful photography that we got in the state and you can see the sky deep into this dark blue and that's because as as Kevin we'll talk later on that we got into a color correction that we do post post launch to make sure that we're capturing all of these the events that are going on all of the flow events so here the vehicle is clearing the pad and we're on our way this view that you're seeing here is is camera e8 or echo 8 and it's a 16 millimeter camera with a 10 millimeter lens you can see the Boosters now coming off the pad and one of the amazing things that a lot of folks don't know about shuttle is bolted to the mobile launch platform is it's basically through four bolts on each solid rocket booster and the intent of these cameras is to watch that bolt which is an explosive nut bolt arrangement and the bolt weighs about a hundred pounds I should say and these nuts fracture and the bolts slap down into a holder that you actually start seeing in the foreground here and they literally release the vehicle from the pad and allow it to to take off so for obvious reasons we have a camera on each one of these explosive hold-down posts and to make sure that they're operating their critical aspect of the launch process we want to make sure that they're operating good so you can see that puffs of smoke coming out and actually if you want to put the remote on a frame-by-frame stop action you can actually see the flashes it explodes now if Kevin here's where you guys really did a fantastic job of capturing the detail in the plume through this automatic aperture on the cameras you want to talk about that a bit sure many of the 16 millimeter cameras that are on the MLP and pad structure have an automatic exposure control it's the only real way to to keep the the exposure of the high dynamic range exposure from pre-ignition of the SRBs through through the liftoff out of the frame of view so the camera has a basically an automatic exposure right now look at this sky on the left thing and see how it gets dark actually on both sides you can see how it turns that deep blue that's the automatic aperture in action right there right allowing it to see the detail in the pad structure and also in the flame yeah I mean when you see a launch in real life you can't see any detail with the naked eye on the plume it's just like looking into the Sun almost is so bright we can see some of the water from the launch pad there's a cooling water that comes out we'll talk about that later that's splashing onto this quartz protective glass at the cameras behind of course they're in these explosion poop containers right keep the cameras safe and sound the errors were harmed in this in the making of this movie that's right the cameras are in an explosion-proof box which is nitrogen purged and the quartz glass on the front protects the lens in most cases there are some cases where there's damage and if that's the case that lenses will be repolished reground or or whatever is necessary to bring them back into optimal condition at this next view coming up is a echo 18 or camera 18 and it's a 10 millimeter lens and looking at the TSM or the tail service mast carrier disconnect yea the umbilicals there's one on each side of the orbiter one for the liquid oxygen fueling and one for the liquid hydrogen fueling those are primary purposes you can see there's a lot of other instrumentation on these things in feed lines but these cameras are their intention is to make sure we get good retraction of this and there's actually a huge 20,000 pound mass that pulls these things inside the tail service mast for the door to slam shut and protect them from the hostile environment on the outside now these umbilicals are about four feet wide by six foot tall so you don't really get a sense of scale when you're looking at these in these movies but they're as big as an average-sized human being so they're quite large one of the interesting photographic challenges that we run into in photographing the TSM carrier disconnect from the inside of the tail service mast is once that door closes its pitch black in there so there's a set of series of tungsten lamps that provide illumination and the vibrations the tremendous amount of vibrations that are induced during the during the liftoff really rattle those lights and keeping them from having those bulbs break is it's been quite a challenge in fact they are in the process of changing those lights over to the new LED arrays that provide more stability and less frequency of having the bulbs go out before the film is that they're a lot more robust to that kind of environment okay Matt this is echo zero zero one and this is a one of the four cameras on the edges of the MLP deck this is on the this camera happens to be on the northeast corner of the MLP deck and it's a 16 millimeter camera as all the ones on the MLP are ten millimeter focal lengths it's a wide-angle view and the effective shutter speed is about one 12 hundredths of a second for our viewers you can see that we pulled a little bit away back from the vehicle now we're taking a little bit of a wider view there's the ssmes just firing off there and you can see the plume in the background growing fact if you look carefully against the plume there you can see a couple of cameras once you mention what those are Kevin those are some Moe TV cameras operational television cameras that are used for surveillance of the other vehicle there the and our pike back live to the launch control complex signals so the ssmes are firing you can actually see the launch tower on the right-hand side of the screen and again they go on for about six seconds computers are making sure that everything is working and that t-minus zero those boosters are going to fire and you'll see a big puff of smoke come out of the flame trench there and it'll get sucked back down in as the boosters come off the pad and these two sort of structures one standing just to the left of the left booster and one standing just to the right of the right booster are called rain Birds and there's some piping sort of flat against the launch pad as well that sort of connect all these things together to go to boosters firing and all of this fresh water three hundred thousand gallons to be exact comes pouring out of those rain birds and onto the launch pad to deaden the acoustic noise and cool the pad down so that's where the water comes from some of these camera shots and here you can see the the AEC the automatic exposure control on the cameras taking over as the booster plume comes into view and allows to see the AEC allows you to see the the detail of both in the plume as well as in the vehicle and structure itself and you can also see very good detail on the deck of the MLP now we talked a little bit about the purpose of each one of these cameras and this one is to look for some structural anomalies on the vehicles some thermal insulation failures we might have on the tiles of the blankets etc and how the water is getting dispersed on the pad and also we're looking at debris and actually you can see here we've got quite a bit of debris in the field and debris is a big concern for the shuttle folks and we want to keep an eye on it to make sure we don't have anything that's going to threaten the vehicle mat you can see that this is a well this is camera echo for a zero zero four it's on the corner of the MLP deck and very similar in field of view to the camera we just looked at what one of the things I like to point out as you can see one of the camera box enclosures we were talking about a little bit earlier on the left-hand side of the frame right in front of the left SRB yeah and in fact as we mentioned earlier in the in the piece there's about a hundred and twenty-five cameras or so actually more the document any given launch and so for brevity in this piece and make it watchable we had to have a lot of a lot of film hit the cutting room floor and it was really difficult for me to to cut a lot of it out because I loved all of the footage I'm a fan of each and every camera but that little camera there didn't get it's it's stay in the shade that that that film of the booster had to but to have that for the director's cut in the future and just to give you a perspective this camera originally captured the scene at 400 frames a second so it's being played back at 24 frames so it's about one sixteenth of the speed that it was actually captured at to give us a real-time view you can see here how absolutely gorgeous the day was and as we mentioned earlier it was about five o'clock in the afternoon so in the film industry they call this Magic Hour and there's no question about it that this is one of the best times a day to take photographs of the show even these rich colors and just a beautiful blue sky to sort of highlight all of this I find these pictures second to none in all of the launch imagery that's been taken I should say that these boosters shut about 10,000 pounds of mass per second once they're lit up and that's each so it's 20,000 pounds combined and you can really get the feel of that awesome magnitude by looking at these images there you see a piece of debris in the right sort of doing a ballet in in slow motion there this is some tide out string from some water membranes under the SRBs that we'll talk about in a few moments you know teams go through this this is engineering footage and the teams go through this and identify everything they see it okay this uh this is a camera echo 36 and this is uh this cameras located on the fixed service structure at the 255 foot level we refer to the fixed service structure as the FSS it's a 16 millimeter camera with a 16 millimeter focal length lens and the effective shutter speed is about a 12 hundredths of a second similar to some of the other ones that we've seen this is a long clip in fact this is probably the longest clip that that I sort of chose for the the production there's a lot going on in here but it looks a little boring for a while because those engines are on for a long time so we're still at 400 frames a second here right yes okay so there you see the main engines igniting you can see all of this water pouring into the flame trench there there's a big flash the hydrogen and the oxygen lighting up I should tell you that coming out of that external tank inside there the cryogenic propellants liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen 750 gallons a second liquid hydrogen is pouring into that engine cluster and 280 gallons a second of liquid oxygen all of these things being combined instantly effectively instantly to to create this fantastic combustion process burning 3000 pounds of propellants to turn it into water vapor every second and it's almost invisible when it comes out of the engines so the engines are turning on now you can sort of see them glowing against the water pouring into the flame trench that water is there primarily to deaden the acoustic noise and to keep things cool and you've got a good look at the belly of the orbiter here one of the purposes of this camera is to look to see if we lose any tiles due to the shock of ignition of the solid rocket boosters now you can see the boos just around in just a couple of minutes and you see those red sort of ribbed surfaces there inside the flame trench those are actually membranes to hold water and those will get burned away and you'll sort of see that in the film when the Boosters fire there you see them right there and there's water in there that's sort of that's sort of getting jarred loose and turning into steam and I'm assuming I don't know for sure that it prevents sort of a recirculation of the exhaust liftoff probably again acoustic deadening noise and there you see those boosters firing off look if you look in the upper left-hand corner you see the the umbilical falling backwards there and then look at how the Space Shuttle main engines are punching through that that that water in the flame trench that's really cool this is quite a dramatic shot and the you can see the auto exposure control on the on the lens as we've talked about on some of the other views really helping to be able to see the detail on the the ssmes punching that hole as well as looking at the plume from the for the from the SRB and seeing the the edge of the belly of the orbiter to see the ssmes aim a little bit off kilter and you can see them hitting the the upper part of the mobile launch platform as they rise off amazing that they capture all that detail in the SRB plumes it's good stuff it's a fantastic clipper yeah really is this is a camera echo 41 this is on the fixed service structure on the FSS at the 255 foot level it's a 10 millimeter focal length on the 16 millimeter camera it's a really interesting view and Matt you want to provide some more details about what we're seeing yeah you can see the Boosters have already fired in this big umbilical structure that you see swinging back it's actually very massive the plate on the end of that is about a foot and a half by 3 foot square you'll see a close-up of that a little bit that's the the ground umbilical to hook up to the the venting for the hydrogen tank and it's got some nitrogen and helium purge lines and some instrumentation to go with it pretty complicated structure you get a picture that in a minute if you look at the MLP or the mobile launch platform you see all the water coming out of the rain birds under the launch pad and again our active exposure kicking in there and giving us a great shot of the plumes as the vehicle clears the tower look on the right you can just see it tad of the ssme burning there that little blue cone fantastic detail there isn't it yeah it's a great shot eko 40 is one of my my favorite shots Matt and this is on the fixed service structure on the FSS at the 275 foot level just a bit higher than the two previous views we saw and this is really an incredible view of not only the orbiter but the beautiful ocean of late spring day in Florida and very nice lighting on the tank and as well as just see on the orbiter surfaces yeah it truly is magic hour on this that orange tank for those that aren't all that familiar with the shuttle that's foam its insulating foam on the tank to keep the cryogenic propellants cold on the inside liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen are pretty chilly when they get into their liquid state but you can actually virtually look into the cockpit here if you look carefully you can see the ocean right through the window just briefly there for a moment kind of fun there's discovery in all its glory this this engineering view is to look at any possible issues with the tiles or the thermal protection system on the vehicle and look at that absolutely gorgeous you can see some of the flakes of ice sort of tracking the vehicle as it moves upwards remember as we mentioned earlier that three thousand pounds of water vapors second is coming out of the space shuttle main engines on the back it's pretty credible and it's virtually invisible alright this view is of a structure we call the GUP which is the ground umbilical carrier plate which attaches to the ground umbilical carrier assembly sometimes called the gutka that plate is about a foot and a half by 3 foot it's a sizable plate you don't really capture the scale in this and you can see the vehicles now lift it up and it's taking off that umbilical peels back right it solid rocket booster separation or detonation and Matt this is camera 33 and this is that on the FSS it's at the 235-foot level and is using a fairly long focal length lens it's and you can tell by the field of view that it is a long focal length lens and it's 75 millimeters now if you look you can see the Boosters kind of surging it's not a continuous pass it sort of pushes and then slows down a little bit and what you're seeing there's the natural frequency of the booster thrust I believe it was on the order of about seven Hertz seven cycles a second and you can see that go by and here the EF skirt of the booster is going by with a really nice tight shot of the exhaust this camera view is on the pad perimeter is located at camera side three is about twelve hundred and seventy three feet away from the from the vehicle and it's the first in a series of the 35 millimeter cameras which will be seeing the upcoming sequences there's a lens on here the focal length is 500 millimeters or so and the effective exposure is a 1/4 50th of a second and the cameras running at 180 frames per second yeah it's a beautiful shot and this is going to is Kevin sets first and thirty five-millimeter shots they're little better quality because they've just got more surface area to put an image on you can see the ssmes firing and all in nominal operation here and as soon as they pull away from the pad you'll see the left booster in the background centered between the two service tail masts and just a gorgeous shot right there looking at the steam coming off the ssmes and this is a fantastic capture of what what remains behind after the vehicle clears the towers you have all of this water and steam being pushed around in this amazing hostile acoustic environment I mean look at what's going on there this is all acoustic noise and shock coming from the Boosters and the ssmes camera 63 is located on the pad perimeter one of the camera sites it's twelve hundred and seventy feet from the vehicle and it's using a hundred five hundred and five millimeter lens the camera is running at 180 frames a second and that's pushing about six hundred and thirty feet of film through the camera per minute quite quite a quite a fast rate especially for thirty five millimeter you can see the sparkers going they're just getting ready to turn the main engines on and in the background you see the water tower that's where all that fresh water comes from do flood the pad to keep it chilled and deaden a lot of that acoustic noise that we've already seen what it looks like in the plume absolutely gorgeous day really accentuated by this shot blue sky in the background goes great with the white exhaust plume coming out there and you can see a lot of splashing and stop jetting out from all different directions at the bottom you'll see more than the shots that are coming up this shot is going to be the first of a bunch of different views as we march counterclockwise around the pad to look at it from different angles and there you can see the Boosters have fired and you see it all coming out the other side of the flame trench and beautiful shot of it coming off the pad the lighting at five o'clock in the afternoon on this late spring day is just about perfect from this camera view of course it won't be perfect for all the views but certainly is a nice angle and really eliminates that the vehicle as well as the structure very nice yeah yeah like when when the vehicle leaves I left a lot of these shots run long because I thought it was kind of neat to see what happens afterwards and you can just see the the whole service structure here being engulfed and steam and exhaust from the solid rocket motors and one interesting thing about the 30 this particular 35 millimeter format is earlier we mentioned about the time code and the irig time code is burned in with an LED display and on the 35 millimeter format it's actually in part of the image area because the 35 millimeter format has four sprockets per frame so there's no way to position the the LED timecode in between the sprockets like we can on the 16 military right so if you looked at the the 16 millimeter you could actually see the the sprockets at the top and the bottom of each frame and those aren't visible in you see here the camera number is on the lower right hand on the lower right hand display of the LED timecode and it's in this case it's camera number 62 so the thirty five-millimeter format also allows us to put a camera designated number that's a fairly often used just to help for viewing purposes and tracking purposes this again is a hundred and five millimeter lens and is on the pad perimeter approximately twelve hundred and seventy feet from the vehicle look at look at the the the absolute force that all this stuff is coming out of there I've talked earlier in the piece about how much is coming out of the solid rocket boosters twenty thousand pounds combined and then the ssmes are losing three thousand pounds of liquid propellants a second and that really shows up here when you're looking underneath the launch platform you can see that all that stuff doesn't have anywhere to go which is why it's vectored out on both sides so it can be sort of safely directed away from the vehicles there's no rebounding or or sort of back flow so to speak one thing we haven't had a chance to talk about earlier is the how the cameras are triggered currently the camera is all triggered using the PAC's with a photo optical control system which triggers all the cameras on the pad perimeter on the fixed service structure as well as the VM LP and it's quite a sophisticated system to synchronize and trigger all the cameras based on the launch clock yeah it's undoubtedly a very complex system to have all these cameras operate flawlessly for each launch they're very important if not critical for for shuttle launches and it's an amazing achievement that all the men and women who work on this are able to do it with such a degree of reliability every launch another shot here is as I said moving around counterclockwise you see the ssmes or the boosters are just firing excuse me and there you see the the GUP falling back as we talked about earlier the umbilical assembly this view is using the same 105 millimeter focal length lens that the other two views we just looked at and again is about 1,200 feet from the from the vehicles where the camera site is located you know this is a really unusual day because you just mentioned earlier that you know from not from all views is the lighting going to be as good but this is about as good as it gets I mean each and every one of these camera views is well exposed both from an engineering and a beauty standpoint they're all very very nice shots and it's why we selected 124 to be the predominant content in this movie there's the lot of the water tower by the way in the foreground it's just about to get engulfed with the exhaust this is a dog 68 it's a 35-millimeter camera and it's really intended to be a documentary camera so it's running at 28 frames per second not really a high-speed camera so it's almost real-time a real-time camera view it's a just a really beautiful shot and because it's a documentary camera we're able to enlarge the aperture so the timing block isn't taking up image area and present it in its widescreen view and I think it's quite dramatic yeah from a from a beauty standpoint this is probably at the top of my list for favorites it's just gorgeous quality fantastic colour saturation and very unusual for shuttle photography to be so beautiful at the same time you so echo 55 begins our series of tracking cameras echo 55 is mounted on a kinetic tracking mount or KTM which we commonly refer to it as and it's located at cs1 about 1,200 feet from the vehicle this is a nice shot because you can see there's a bit of a distortion cloud here that we're shooting through and what that is is hydrogen being burned off from the fueling system they burn off any excess hydrogen to safely combust it and so that's what we're seeing here and it's really gorgeous as the vehicle sort of comes out of that and goes into its roll program clearing the tower again just a fantastically well lit photograph on this on this day some of the white things that you see falling off there are paper covers which protect some of the order maneuvering system engines we'll talk about those later but Kevin these are all manually operated right I mean there are human beings behind the scenes doing this tracking now yes this is a KTM or the kinetic tracking mount has about four cameras up that are mounted on it and this particular camera echo 55 is one of a pair of cameras and is intended to look at the top half of the vehicle while the other camera is intended to look at the bottom portion of the vehicle right and we'll see that in the next shot we'll have one of the one of the V views from the bottom of the stack on the next one in fact our intent is to have in the deleted scenes on this disc a set of camera pair views sort of pieced together so you can see them simultaneously so look for that in the extra features this is this is a fantastic now they're completely done with a roll program and sort of on their way yeah the the intent of that camera shot is only for the first 1,200 feet of the ascent is really the intention of that that view and that takes about 18 to 20 seconds I believe okay now this is camera 52 and this is of course is at the bottom of the stack now so it's a little different view and but part of a camera pair again right this is this camera is uh as you said is 52 and this is located on camera site 2 and is about the same distance 1200 feet 1270 feet from the vehicle nice shot of the ssme is there it always amazes me how transparent the exhaust coming out of the ssmes is now this kinetic tracking mount is is controlled by an operator manually controlled by an operator who's sitting in the LCC on the second floor below the firing room and the person he or she is using a trackball to track the vehicle and it's pretty tricky because they're just looking at a little video monitor and the vehicle is moving much faster in real-time that we're seeing we're seeing it you know one-fifth of speed in this particular case of what it is in real time this kinetic tracking mount also has HDTV cameras that are mounted that are used for what we'll call quick look what's called quick look to look at the these views in real-time and then in near real-time they start the image analysis this is done while the film is getting processed and transferred that was a fantastic shot seeing the Sun go right in between the two plumes and in fact it gives you an idea how bright these plumes are to the naked eye because the Sun is it passed through there wasn't much brighter than the plumes that you saw wonderful shots showing the column of fire that the vehicle Rises on and it really contrasts nicely with the blue again highlighting why sts-124 was was really the correct mission to to sort of springboard off of to show all the beautiful film this is a camera 57 this is at cs6 again 1200 feet from the pad or so and we're looking at the bottom half of the vehicle as I mentioned earlier the camera is mounted on a tracker KTM tracker has four or five different cameras on there and this is the lower half film camera looking at the bottom of the vehicle you can see the paper covers come off the RCS engines those are Tyvek covers just same same kind of material that you put on your house when building it and those covers are there in case they get a squall or a little storm why the shuttles out on the pad not uncommon in Florida and we can't afford to have water inside those engines so we put those paper covers on there and they have these little pair of foils that inflate sort of tear the cover off they're just adhered with an adhesive of some kind so the you'll see a lot of that white paper coming off during these launch shots beautiful shot looking up the tail end of the stack and possibly on the deleted features or the deleted scenes on this disc we're going to try to edit a piece together showing this the camera pair the views from the camera pairs pieced together and it should look pretty nice to look at that on our deleted scenes feature on the disc this is Echo 225 as you can see it's already in flight it's a really interesting view it's a medium range tracking camera the mount and the camera are located at UCS 4 which is about 2.4 miles north of the pad one of the reasons I selected this shot to be included on the DVD is because I thought it was really striking and really beautiful how in their role program is they went into their role the the Sun sort of peeks over like it does here and you can see the name pop out and slowly the whole orbiter becomes lit with the with the Evening Sun and the textures are fantastic here you can see the thermal blankets you can see some of the thermal exposure to the thermal blankets you see some variation in color and you can see the tiles literally make out the the boundaries of the tiles there so really a wonderful piece of footage and a remarkable contribution the DVD from a photography standpoint the lens that's on the camera is in a 150 inch bashir lens it's a catadioptric lens so it's got a mirror surface and it's about four thousand millimeters focal length if you converted the inches to millimeters just to give a perspective mat the weight of this lens is about two hundred and fifty pounds just the lens itself it's a huge lens and really unbelievable piece of optics you can really see a lot of nice textures on this shot too on the on the booster if you look at the the forward part of the booster you can see the access panels and that big line coming off the external tank that's actually the oxygen feed line on the external tank that's where that two hundred eighty gallons a second of liquid oxygen are flowing through to the main engines that feed lines about 17 inches in diameter so it's a pretty beefy system and I think another thing to point out here is that this camera mount is manually track so the operator is looking through a bore sight at the camera sight launch vibrations going on all around him or her and keeping that vehicle dead center in the frame and so quite amazing feat to be able to do that so quite so accurately yeah they they've done a great job of keeping on target every step of the way now they're getting a little further away obviously and you can see sort of the glow of those engines starting to come up against the bottom part of the stack there as they call it and lets you know that something's going on at the back that vehicle so the next series of shots were going to see is the views from the HD cameras and in this particular view this is from sts-114 return to flights this was in July 26 of 2005 and we're about one about two miles from the pad just south of a pad 39b here and the camera is uh is cocked at a 45 degree angle to enable maximum use of the 16 by 9 aspect ratio that is available with the HD TV cameras now it's important our viewers take a good look into the left window there you can actually see Eileen Collins who commanded this mission you can see her suit inside the window absolutely amazing and this is a first right this is a first in the program we started using high-definition video after Columbia and that was one of the first times we saw this level of detail in photography that is correct so this particular camera view is ehv 225 this was recorded on sts-1 17 it was in June 2006 and the camera is running at 60 frames a second as all the HDTV cameras do the orientation of the camera is is cocked at 45 degrees to make maximum use of the aspect ratio of the 16 by 9 frame to get as much of the vehicle space shuttle vehicle in the frame as possible this particular shot I chose because it's well exposed and it shows a beautiful sequence in the roll program but you also get this really nice vapor phenomenon as the vehicle accelerates to higher speeds and this is not always visible to the for every launch is it's a consequence of atmospheric conditions so dewpoint humidity etc so I thought it was kind of a nice nice touch to this particular image this is the only long-range camera that made the final cut and Kevin will give you the details about that in a moment but I want you to look at the bottom of the tank there as you saw it just sort of became engulfed in flames and you should know that this is a normal phenomenon in a shuttle launch what's effectively occurring here is the exhaust gases coming out of the SRBs and the ssmes are sort of expanding into the higher vacuum as they head into space and the radiant heat from the expanded plumes becomes high enough to ignite symbolic gases that are caught up in this aerodynamic dead zone so to speak at the rear of the tank for a couple of moments during flight but this is an amazing shot Kevin because it's from so far away so why don't you explain what we're looking at here yeah Matt the camera here is located at a place called Apollo Beach it's within Cape Canaveral National Seashore and the camera mount is about 20 miles north of the pad so it's quite a distance away this is a Brashear 150 inch lens again about four thousand millimeters so quite a quite a distance in the trackers as we've mentioned earlier is manually operated as an operator looking through a scope and using a trackball to keep the vehicle in the field of view yeah it's also difficult for the operator because of the distance to see the vehicle at launch to sight the pad yes yes the tension light right so so he or she grabs it on the fly and it's quite a quite a skill level that's a that needs to be developed in order to do that well and of course we watched our solid rocket boosters separate which is sort of at the tail end of what we can see with with all of the tracking cameras and there you see our boosters coming off and they separated about 29 miles in altitude about two minutes into flight and they are recovered by divers out in the Atlantic Ocean and although they appear to be falling back here they're actually traveling another 15 miles or so up just tumbling on their own forward momentum before they peak and then come back down in the Atlantic about 150 miles out where the diving teams pick them up bring them back for refurbishment so this sort of brings us to the end of our production hope you guys have enjoyed the commentary Kevin and I have enjoyed doing it today for you and as the boosters sort of fade out and the external tank in the orbiter continued on their way to orbit we want to dedicate this movie to all of the men and women over the 30 years of the program or so that have committed themselves to capturing all of these fine images it's a amazing work takes a lot of commitment and it's extraordinarily tough to do so and our hats off to them so Kevin thanks for doing this with me thank you it's been a wonderful endeavor and hopefully we'll see each other again on the next space program so signing off

Channel: NASA

Views: 1,082,300

Rating: 4.9102683 out of 5

Keywords: NASA, Shuttle, Launch, KSC, Best

Id: vFwqZ4qAUkE

Length: 45min 24sec (2724 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/MrTurkle]

I know this has probably been answered by rocket scientists, but why is a vertical launch preferred over a gradual ascent? If the hardest part is accelerating over the forces of gravity, why not just lessen the needed thrust by decreasing launch angle? I guess that would take longer to get to space and use just as much fuel?

[u/tyrroi]

You can post this to /r/rocketlaunches

[u/sixpackabs592]

i like the old apollo high speed footage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPW7ZqtW5U4

[u/DJ-Anakin]

Watched this the other day at home with my 9 year old. We loved it. My wife even sat there for about 20 minutes of it! That shows houw beautiful these events were!

[u/[deleted]]

As a layperson, this is mind-blowing footage and analysis. It's surreal thinking how far humanity has come technologically. Awesome video, thanks for sharing.

[u/Stakenshake]

They said that this was going to be on a disc, does anyone know of the documentary that this is apart of. I would love to see this without the youtube compression.

[u/zeroes0]

In retrospect it seems obvious now, but I always thought the booster just dropped back down after stopping and detaching. I forgot they still have velocity and continue to travel, but 15 more miles? God damn.

[u/nerdpox]

This has been reposted like 50 times, but I still watch it every time, because it's awesome.

[u/TheMeiguoren]

This is fantastic.

I do have one question, why did they only shoot footage of these launches in visible light? It would be incredibly useful to be able to look through that steam or at least get a broader slice of the spectrum.