I wish the cameras used film like NASA did for Saturn V. The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film. And this is made worse with the night launches that Blue Origin are doing.
In Saturn V launches you could see see detail in the bright flame structures along with background detail.
Maybe some of the upcoming digital cameras chips will have higher dynamic range eventually. I know Nikon has a paper talking about stacked sensors that are trading off high frame rate for high dynamic range: https://youtu.be/jcc1CvqCTeU?si=DuIu4BK48iZTlyB2
> The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film.
Film negatives have a dynamic range of between 12 to 15 stops, but a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print (perhaps less if digitally scanned).
The Arri ALEXA Mini LF has 14.5 stops of dynamic range, and the ALEXA 35 has 17 (Table 2):
* https://www.arri.com/resource/blob/295460/e10ff8a5b3abf26c33...
those engineering cameras were not your regular run-of-the mill cameras neither.
NASA published a 45 min documentary of the 10-15 engineering cameras of an STS launch., with comments on the engineering aspets of the launch procedure.
Very beautiful, relaxing, has an almost meditative quality. Highly recommend it.
Yeah and Shuttle cost a fortune per launch.
Views are distinctly secondary to an affordable launch program.
You should check out the Artemis I engineering footage.
I don't think it's a technical issue, they probably just don't care, we lost a bit of the magic and ideals we had back then
I think the last thing you could probably say about the teams involved in this is that they don’t care.
It could be an exposure issue. Film has a response curve with a big “shoulder” in the highest values. It makes it really hard to blow out highlights.
Digital sensors have a linear response to light, so if the highlights are a bit over a threshold, they are gone.
If you’re willing to tolerate more noise and shoot RAW, you could underexpose, perhaps by as much as 4 stops, and apply a strong curve in post. It would pretty much guarantee no blown out highlights.
Most people find luminance noise aesthetically pleasing up to a point and digital is already much cleaner than film ever was, so it’s a worthy trade off, if you ask me. But “Expose To The Left/Right” is a heated topic among photographers.
> talking about stacked sensors
why not just stacked cameras with a range of filters? modern cameras cost and weight nothing (and that rocket puts 45 ton into LEO)
Webcast of the launch @ T-20 seconds - https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859
Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.
People in the internet don't enjoy rocket launch with roaring sounds unless there is laugh track over it that validates that the launch is awesome and simulates social connection.
You don't say. SpaceX used to have "technical" launch streams with just launch status updates, but even they no longer do that :-/
Didnt they get caught when a launch went badly but their narrator keep reading from the script, reporting events that clearly were not happening? I would watch a technical stream, but i can read a canned script myself.
Unintentional remedy: with Starlink now giving them HD video coverage for the whole flight, I doubt they would be able to do this convincingly anymore. (Assuming they ever did. I do not know about any such launch)
No, that never happened.
Worst part of any SpaceX live stream.
Is there a footage without the hysterical screeching?
As has been noted by others, the emoting is a distraction. I could only watch this for a few seconds.
Another thing: why are they reporting speed in miles per hour, and altitude in feet? Surely anybody interested in space is familiar with SI units.
Just a guess, but aerospace generally works with feet for altitude and knots/mph for airspeed, internationally. I’m doing a PPL in Europe and we, like everybody, use feet and knots/mph. I believe this is because the US have been on the forefront of aerospace regulation (a set of rules called the chicago convention is the basis of all air law) and aircraft manufacturing.
Not for aerospace no
And knots are not mph, they're "nautical miles per hour" which are a different measure (1nm is 1.8km, not 1.6km as the regular mile")
Sorry, not a native speaker, I was under the impression that aerospace means air and space. I guess i meant aviation.
I didn’t imply knots are mph, I used the slash to signify “or”. They are completely different units, but both are used. Sometimes the airspeed indicator even has two scales, one for kt and one for mph.
Can confirm, all aviation worldwide deals in feet and knots. It's also because it's much easier to do calculations on the fly (literally) - in your head. Metric is precise and logical but harder to use in stressful situations.
Can you please give some real-world example of why it's easier to do calculations? Not disputing what you say, just hard for me to imagine why it would be so.
1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%.
Knots are also handy for navigation as 1 nautical mile equals 1 minute of latitude. And of course a knot is 1 nautical mile per hour. So if you're doing 300 knots, that's 5 degrees of latitude per hour.
The units fit together nicely as a system.
The calculation in the metric system would not necessarily be more complicated, but it would be different because the reference points in the metric system are not directly aligned with the geography of the Earth.
"1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%."
You are right. It's an easy calculation. But I would say its easy because its historically based on imperial units. Its easy to think about easy calculations like this in metric units like:
A 5% slope means descending 1 meter vertically for every 20 meters horizontally.
I suspect that the math is even easier using meters, meters, and meters per second than nautical miles, feet, and knots. I'll eat my hat if you can tell me the conversion from feet or inches to nautical miles without looking it up
Well if what they say is true then 100ft/min = 1 nautical mile/60min, so one nautical mile is 6000ft. Or I guess I missed the about so not exactly.
This sums it up. Metric is nice and clean tenths, but the real world is seldomly easily expressed in clean tenths.
Another example: The feet is cleanly divisible in thirds, quarters, and twelfths, which is greatly appreciated in industry and particularly construction.
Also to be bluntly mundane, almost everyone can just look down and have a rough measure of a foot which is good enough for daily use.
Also, the "sterility" of metric doesn't do it any sentimental favours. Japan loves measuring size/volume in Tokyo Domes, for example.
Not really, I have no idea what a foot is. But I can just look at yhe tiles and know they are 1*1 meter
Who cares? It's what the indicator says, I don't need to visualize feet to do calculations and talk to the tower about them.
If you can see a 1x1m tile from the cockpit, you're dead.
If you're an amputee I truly am sorry for you and hope the handicap hasn't disrupted your life too much.
Jokes(...?) aside though, your absolute deference to precision is an example of why metric flies over people's heads. Feets, Tokyo Domes, arguably even nautical miles and so on are relatable at a human level unlike metric which is too nice and clean.
This sort of argument is odd to someone in a country which uses both, where a yard is intuitively "a bit smaller than a metre", a pint corresponds to a pint glass or "about half a litre" rather than anything meaningful and I'm aware that a rod and a furlong are things but have absolutely no idea what they correspond to. A foot is comfortably bigger than the average foot size, and an inch really isn't an easier unit to approximate than a centimeter
Certainly not "worldwide". China uses metres. Recreational aircraft in Europe often use metres (almost all sailplanes).
No glider I have ever stepped in used metres. It doesn't make any sense, the tower wants to hear feet and knots and will communicate using that.
Thank you, I wasn't aware of China using metres. It turns out Russia uses them as well, confusingly below the transition level.
You can be just as precise with either system.
"Metric is precise and logical but harder to use in stressful situations."
That fully depends on your cultural background. Feet, miles etc. are so foreign to me that I would be unable to calculate with them under stress.
But I am not a pilot nor a navigator, so...
No, it doesn't. I'm European, never used imperial before I became a pilot, and it's easier. Check it out, the formulas are much simpler to do in your head. Intuition doesn't matter, all that matters is that I can do the calculations quickly so I know I'm within parameter limits.
Glad to hear it wasn't just me being grumpy, I also found it immensely annoying and distracting.
Perhaps it's considered more patriotic to reject scientific units?
I don't understand why they reserve 6 digits for the speed in mph either. Are they expecting it to go beyond 99,999 mph?
Do they also report the speed of light as Walmart parking lots per standard commercial tv break duration?
Edit: as an Amazon product it would probably use Amazon(tm) cardboard box unit as the length metric and standardized warehouse drone toilet break as duration.
You're trying to break free of Earth's gravity well, so you might as well use Freedom Units.
Have to agree with others that the horrible laughing ruins what should be a monumentous occasion for the company and humanity.
Think about it. The fruit of their hard work over all those years while enduring people pointing fingers and memes at them... and now their powerful rocket roars, rumbles and lifts... Ofcourse it is emotional. And looks like me personally enjoy it. Perhaps that is taken from spacex stream where you see people cheering on achieving significant milestones... just gives you some of it.
Perhaps that audio could have been only when showing people cheering or what, but anyways, I'm surprised BO even set up that much of a show for external viewers.
SpaceX obviously has spoiled us. Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?
> Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?
What do you mean? Rocket launches have been filmed for ages, and without the laugh track, see that random launch of Ariane 4 in 1988 for example, that includes an on-board view (the replay does include some clapping from spectators though):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_E4naQgTl0
You could already see them on live TV at the time. The Space X launches today certainly have better quality but it's not like launches were impossible to watch in the past.
Personally I like the contrast between the laugh of joy and relief and background cheers from the team that have spent the past few years building it, and the calm technical announcements coming from somebody who probably feels the same way...
As a non-USian looking in, it seemed fairly average and non-horrible to me? I find it interesting to find several comments like this one here so prominently compared to the discussion thread about SpaceX launches.
It’s just people looking for something to crap on. God forbid those engineers celebrate years of their own work.
Why is that interesting?
Dupe of / More details & discussion here,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721882 ("Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video) (blueorigin.com)", 55 comments)
I might say "More details & discussion here", vs. "Dupe of". For those who don't want to burn time watching video, the Ars story is an excellent summary.
Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.
And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has burnt but it seems to be largely supported by Bezos who years ago pledged to fund it to the tune of $1 billion a year. Allegedly BO has >11K employees and payroll alone is estimated to exceed $2B a year with little revenue to pay for it. Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.
Now consider the market for the New Glenn. It seems to have a payload capacity around 3x that of Falcon 9 and 2/3 that of Falcon Heavy. As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy, there having been 11 launches (compared to 439 for Falcon 9). SpaceX also has created demand through Starlink.
For anyone launching a satellite, the Falcon 9 has an impressive track record. It's unclear how much SpaceX saves by reusing first stage boosters but it certainly increases their potential launch cadence and there were close to 150 launches in 2024 alone.
So I'm happy to see competition in this field but it's unclear to me what market there is for New Glenn (or even Starship for that matter, but that's a separate story) but Falcon 9 seems to have saturated the launch market. It's really the Boeing 747 of launch vehicles. For those unfamiliar, the 747 was such a competitive advantage and cash cow for Boeing for quite literally decades. That's how dominant the Falcon 9 is.
It's going to replace ULA as the secondary option for DoD launches. That's a multi-billion dollar contract.
It'll put price pressure on SpaceX who have been able to charge increasingly large amounts without the competition from ULA recently.
> Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.
Which puts it about the level of my ski season pass in his budget. A hobby scale expenditure.
> Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.
And Ford Motor Companies was founded in 1903 and still hasn't gotten above the Karman line. Wow, they're a massive failure as a company.
Blue wasn't aiming for an orbital rocket for years.
I don't understand why making excuses for their failure, 10 years after spaceX started reusing their rockets. There are so many competitors now and china is doing quite well, that we don't need participation trophies.
Reaching orbit on the first try is a big deal. I think it deserves recognition and celebration.
Noone has ever managed to nail the landing of an orbital class booster on the first try.
> Noone
Name another company that even landed orbital class booster on whatever try.
10 years ago it was an impossible feat many were laughing at.
The space shuttle achieved reusable booster landing in the 80s with parachutes and water.
Delta clipper controlled burn relanding in the 90s but not scaled to orbital class.
Nobody with any sense for how rockets work should be impressed with parachuting and refurbing SRB tubes. Landing a proper rocket stage the real way is an impressive feat of robotics and engine engineering. The shuttle SRB thing was a wasteful farce meant to pay lip service to the loftier goals set by earlier Shuttle proposals (such as real flyback boosters.)
A far better example, although still not exactly the same sort of thing, would be landing the SSMEs with every orbiter landing. They obviously required refurbishment (as all Falcon 9 Merlin engines do too) and the propellant tanks were expended, but the engineering that went into the SSMEs is a much better example of precedent to Falcon 9 than dropping spent SRBs on parachutes.
SLS/Artemis is actually using some of the specific SSMEs that have flown before on Shuttles. Veteran engines, but they will be discarded this time, no more refurbing. What a damn shame.
Solid engine booster isn't in the same category of complexity as liquid engine booster, though.
I don't understand why you're drawing attention to their failure, it doesn't mean anything. Failure by anyone on the first time of anything is understandable.
But I'm interested to know what the extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of, especially reusable ones with a low cost. SpaceX of course, but Boeing is out to lunch.
> extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of
New Glenn, Vulcan and Falcon Heavy/Starship.
There'll be a Chinese option shortly for those that are truly launcher-agnostic.
I'm about as big a SpaceX fanboy as possible, and still find this a remarkable achievement.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.
Didn't we laude SpaceX for failing fast and moving forward?
”Many” competitors? I thought that in this vehicle category (large&affordable) Space X was the only competitor?
Blue Origin changed CEOs two years ago and since then it started to pull forward.
They may have failures during flights, but they aren't a failure as a company.
This. I used to be very skeptical of anything Blue Origin. But after the CEO change they appear to have changed their attitude for the better.
They are not on SpaceX level, but they are growing recently and I think this test, even with the many problems or things I didn't like (SpaceX spoiled us), it was positive.