How did NASA get those great film shots of Apollo and the Shuttle?

These are some of the iconic pieces of launch footage from the space race and the shuttle program, shots taken that would be impossible for any human to see close up and personal and many of them were done long before we had miniature high-definition cameras and high-speed data links beaming the footage live from space so how did NASA film these incredible shots of Apollo the space shuttle and beyond. Now as good as these look from an aesthetic point of view they weren't done just to wow the public, they had a very important engineering role and that was their primary purpose to show the engineers and scientists just what was going on at critical stages of the launch and in some cases like the shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters they were key in finding out exactly what happened. The story of how these techniques were developed goes back to the very first long-range ballistic missile the V2, the world's first CCTV system was developed by Walter bruch in order to observe the rocket launches from a safe distance in a bunker. At the time there was no way to record the video footage, so cameraman had to stand within the walled test area to film the launches, an extremely dangerous place to be so close to prototype rockets. Major General dr. Walter Dornberger, the V2 project leader recalled how on one V2 test the rocket launched but then stalled and hovered about four metres above the launch table, something that normally preceded it falling back in exploding. About a hundred meters from the rocket and next of a test area earth wall a cameraman was filming it with a hand-cranked camera. After about five seconds the rocket started to rise as its fuel was depleted and it became lighter, it gradually rose up remaining vertical and slowly travelling sideways towards the cameraman who continued filming till it passed almost directly overhead at which point he then stopped filming and ducked down, the rocket exploded a split second later and crashed about 40 meters beyond the test area wall a remarkable feat of bravery on behalf of a cameraman who survived unscathed. When the U.S. took the surviving stock of around a hundred V2's to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico after the war they needed a way to observe and record their test fights in greater detail and safety than was done before. In 1946 Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who first discovered Pluto 16 years earlier was invited to come to White Sands to help improving optical instruments tracking of the Rockets. Tombaugh's team built their tracking system on a world war 2 M/45 quad mount anti-aircraft platform affectionately known as "little bright eyes" this was because of a binoculars the operator used to manually guide the field of view along the flight path which were fitted between the five and six inch reflector telescopes attached to two 35mm cameras which had replaced the 50 calibre guns. But it wasn't only ground cameras that were of importance. In 1946 Clyde Holliday an engineer working on the V2 program modified a 35 mm movie camera to withstand the shock of the launch and the impact when it came back to earth. On October 24th 1946 the camera which used Eastman Kodak Super XX film running at 4 frames per second was mounted into an aluminium case with ten millimeter thick walls and into the body of a V2 rocket and then launched to a height of a 107 kilometers. This was the first time that anyone had seen the earth from the edge of space. From here they could clearly say 1,200 kilometers in all directions in area the equivalent of 4.1 million square kilometers and they could clearly see the curvature of the earth. The M-45 platform was used on three further tracking mounts at the White Sands range and some of the T4 systems are still in use today. But as America went from testing small ballistic missiles of a mighty Saturn V, a huge array of different cameras became necessary to check the complex systems during launch. At the John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida a concrete launchpad at complex 39a was riddled with fixed high-speed cameras able to record on for 16mm film at 500 frames per second. By the time of Apollo 11 there were 201 cameras recording the launch 119 for engineering and 82 for documentary purposes. This footage is from camera E8 which was housed within the concrete pad itself out of line of sight of the engines and pointed at a heat-resistant mirror made of quartz glass to avoid being destroyed at liftoff. Above the pad similar high frame rate cameras on gantry's film the Rockets clean separation from the umbilical connections as for Saturn V cleared the tower. The ascent was broadcast to a live TV audience worldwide from a camera on a mount descended from Tombaugh's bright eyes. From the mid-1960s purpose-built tracking mounts were made by companies like Photo Sonic's, their cine-sextant optical tracking mount held twin telescopes on powerful motorized pedestals allowing heavier optics to track the launch at greater ranges. This footage from Apollo 4 shows the first stage separation and height of 65 kilometers, 211,000 feet and was captured by a camera on the ground but even with powerful telescopes like this they couldn't see the detail of what was happening in the rocket itself. To see this cameras were fitted into the Saturn rocket stages to film a stage separations. In fact the now iconic separation footage seen here was from cameras mounted in the base of the second stage and is often shown as part of Apollo 11 footage but he's actually from Apollo 4. These cameras weren't used on Apollo 11 due to lack of space available. Apollo 4 was the first unmanned test of a full Saturn V rocket and many things still remained unknown about how it would react during the launch. The engineers wanted to see that the stages separated cleanly and that the interstage structures, that's the smaller ring like object here, didn't hit the engines during separation as the clearances were very tight. The J2 engines seen in the top of the frame are firing although the hot exhaust plume is invisible in the vacuum of space but its effects can be seen on the interstage section as it falls away. On Apollo 6 there were six film cameras and two TV cameras. The film cameras ran out a 100 frames per second and were fitted into pods that were ejected from the stage shortly after separation as you can see here. These would fall back to earth and once they were in the lower atmosphere they would inflate para-balloons to Slow landing into the sea and allow them to float. There was also a radio beacon which was activated and allowed them to be found in the Atlantic Ocean normally around about 600 miles downrange but not all the pods were recovered. On Apollo 6 only two of the six were found and in 1964 on mission SA-7 they ended up being ejected into hurricane Gladys as it made its way across Atlantic. However several weeks later two of them were washed up undamaged on the islands of San Salvador and Eleuthera. Whilst some of the cameras filmed the subject directly others were the first to use fiber optics to remotely place the lenses away from the actual cameras to film places that will be otherwise inaccessible, like this the inside of the fuel tanks to see how the fuel reacted in low gravity and how much it sloshed around during the launch, something that could seriously affect the Rockets guidance if it was not controlled. A decade later the tracking mounts again had to catch up with a broadcast of the first flight of the American space shuttle Columbia. When the shuttle launched on the 12th of April 1981 the stakes were high, to broadcast the launch to a TV audience who were now more than ever watching in full color. A government contract was awarded to the private company Contraves to deliver a new mobile optical platform which they called the Kineto Tracking mount or KTM. Like the photo sonic platform these retained the recognizable format of the M-45 mount however they could either be manned or set up for remote operation within the launch exclusion zone. Although the new robotic mounts were greeted with suspicion by the camera operators at the Kennedy Space Center, 10 mobile KTMs were positioned around the launch center. short-range optics on these mounts film from T-10 seconds to T+57 seconds with longer range optics capturing until T+165 seconds. This piece of footage here of the shuttle discovery at T+40 seconds is shot from a medium distance camera about 3.8 kilometers from the launch pad using a 150 inch lens with a 4,000mm focal length as the shuttle is accelerating through 20,000 feet. As discovery goes through a 145,000 feet at a hundred and 23 seconds into the flight, the Boosters separate which is captured here by another 150 inch 4000mm focal length lens on a KTM. The weight of the lens alone on these was about a 115kg and the tracking to keep the discovery in the frame was done by a human and not an automated system. After three minutes the job of filming the ascent was transferred to the largest telescope on the site the permanently mounted 24-inch aperture Recording Optical Tracking Instrument or ROTI. With a focal length of up to 12,700mm ROTI had enough magnification to follow the launch for up to five minutes after liftoff. ROTI used both radar assisted tracking and a joystick for manual adjustment, which had such a fine sensitivity but it could register the heartbeat of the user if held to firmly. During the early shuttle launches over a 130 cameras were used to record all aspects of the launch combining 16mm, 35mm and 70mm film formats as well as high-definition video. Film was used even after the advent of video because of its high resolution an actual wider dynamic range that's its ability to keep very bright and normally lit objects in the same scene without them being washed out. The video was used for quick access to footage whilst the film was being processed. The high speed film cameras were placed in explosion-proof boxes close to the launch pad to record different aspects of a flight. Here is camera E-19. It's running at 400 frames per second with a 10 mm wide angle lens and recording the engine startup and flame pattern. The cameras were fitted with automatic exposure control to allow them to film the exhaust plume that from the solid rocket boosters, which looks as bright as the Sun. You can see how wide the dynamic range this gives and how well it works when combined with film as in this shot you have the super-bright SRB exhaust with the blue sky behind it and both are perfectly exposed. This shot is actually recording the operation of the explosive hold down bolts, four of which held down each of the SRBs to the mobile launch pad until the point of liftoff. Another great shot is that of a tail service mount disconnect from camera E-18 there was one of these on each side of a shuttle, one for the liquid hydrogen and one for the liquid oxygen. Again the 16mm camera used a 10 millimeter lens and was running at 400 frames per second as were most of the engineering cameras on the mobile launch pad. What's not easily apparent from this shot is the size of a connector. Each one was 1.2 meters wide by 1.8 meters high that's bigger than most house doors. They were pulled in with a force of 9,000 kilograms before the protective blast doors dropped down. One of the biggest challenges was that once the door was shut it was pitch black inside so they had to be lit by tungsten but the vibration was so strong but it would blow the filaments in the lamps so on the latest missions LED lighting is now used instead. Cameras were also vital to the investigation of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. As the space shuttle Challenger rose into the sky on the icy morning of January 28th 1986 the high frame rate cameras on the launch tower filmed a puff of gray smoke escaping from the side of the right solid rocket booster but by the time the pictures were examined it was far too late. 17% of all Americans were watching including millions of schoolchildren as challenger broke up 73 seconds after launch broadcast live the footage of STS 51- L remains among the most unforgettable tragic for the space program. During the investigation of the disaster footage from NASA's tracking cameras was essential to identifying the sequence events during challengers last flight with the ROTI's high magnification the burst of superheated gas from the SRB can be seen and during the explosion the individual elements of the orbiter can be identified including the crew cabin which was designed to survive much greater pressures than the fuselage and was only destroyed on impact with the ocean surface below. Such tragic accidents led to wider use of cameras for each launch with a number of KTMs increasing to 14 following but Columbia Shuttle disaster in 2003 with the return to flight in 2005 STS-114 had over 400 cameras monitoring the launch on this launch rocket cam would be used for the second time this is a camera system that is fitted to the outside of the SRBs and the main fuel tank. At about 127 seconds into the flight a large piece of debris about 92 centimeters by 27 centimeters was caught by a rocket cam falling from the main fuel tank but luckily not hitting anything. 20 seconds later another smaller pace hit the right wing but after checking with the orbiter boom sensor system, it was found not to have caused any damage. Rocketcam is now used on most launches and is responsible for the amazing external footage of things like booster separations and the landing of the SpaceX reusable rockets. The return to flight also used high-definition cameras aboard the B-57 canberra aircraft at an altitude of 60,000 feet over 18 kilometers for WB 57 ascent video experiment was able to film a shuttle even in overcast weather tracking the launch over a 643 kilometre path into space. So what's your favourite piece of launch footage let me know in the comments below and maybe you're one of the amateur rocketry servers or one of the workers of the Kennedy Space Center it will be great to hear your views in the comments. This was also another video voted for by the curious droid Patreon group which I'd like to thank for all their ongoing support and also you can find out more by clicking on the link now showing so thanks for watching and please subscribe thumbs up and share.

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 2,332,602

Rating: 4.876503 out of 5

Keywords: apollo, nasa, spacex, space shuttle, space shuttle challenger, space shuttle columbia, apollo 11 take off, apollo 4, ktm, little bright eyes, clyde holliday, clyde tombaugh, saturn v launch, 16mm film camera, launchpad, high speed camera, cine-sextant, cine-sextant mobile tracking system, curious droid, curious-droid.com, paul shillito, andy munzer, space, rocketcam delta, solid rocket booster hold down camera, rocket separation

Id: BlPfHV36G-g

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

What a great video to start the day off with!

[u/yankeybeans]

Excellent job

[u/AFruitShopOwner]

Nice to see that Varys has expended his field of expertise to include rocket science

[u/Kfey93]

This is the type of shit that needs to be on the Discovery and History Channels...not your garbage bs reality TV shows.

[u/sovietmudkipz]

Seeing the boosters vibrate while blasting off at 11m29s fills me with a sense of a hard to describe joy.

It looks like something you might see in a mech anime. I love the fact that the jostling of the engines seems chaotic at first yet it crescendos with the culmination of the blue flame that blasts further away from the source and the engines stabilizing.

So. Freaking. Cool.

This documentary is great. That shot, though, is pure A E S T H E T I C S. Thanks for bringing it to my attention redditor!

[u/esplanadeoc]

Thanks for posting!

[u/DigitalClarity]

That was incredible. Documentary standard presentation. Very impressed.

[u/pickled-egg]

Very cool. I'd never seen that shot of the liquid oxygen connector and the blast shield coming down.

[u/Matt_Ryans_Bra]

This is nuts! I used to fix and perform preventive maintenance on those Photosonics cameras when I was in the Air Force from 2006-2009. The quality and engineering that went into those things was amazing. Never though I'd watch a video on Youtube about them.