One issue that I really don't understand is why the onboard cameras are so bad and are badly positioned.
A huge part of this program is to generate buzz and interest in the public about the human space program. A large part of that is pretty pictures, to be honest.
The onboard video quality looks like 720p at best and the exposure is for the Orion vehicle, not Earth or the moon. And the video seems horizontally distorted.
I'd have to look, but I'm guessing this is an engineering camera meant to primarily view the physical state of the craft.
That being said, after billions of dollars to get this thing into space, they should have accounted for the need and benefits of better footage.
While the mission is going on, they first send down low-res versions that are optimized for mission operations. That's why the exposure is for the vehicle and not the moon.
Higher res ones that are focused on the moon will come later.
The pink elephant here is that you have to try to be impressed by things like this. And try somewhat hard. It's a low quality picture of the Moon, the same body we had astronauts walking on and live-streaming footage from literally more than half a century ago. If we were coming from a background of zero, this would be amazing. But as we aren't it's really kind of a sad reminder that technological progress, or even stability, is not a given.
By contrast when one watches the Falcon Heavy land [1], it's enough to give you goosebumps. I've shown that video to quite a lot of people outside the space world, and the most common response has been "Is that real!?" Even look at the YouTube comments and it's suddenly enough to even turn the internet into a domain of hope and aspiration. The problem is almost nobody knows about that, let alone the major ongoing progress since, or the implications of things like Starship.
So I think, without much to be truly inspired by, people are (perhaps subconsciously) simply discounting the possibility of space going anywhere during their lifetimes. If Starship achieves even a fraction of its potential, I would expect views to change. Because that genuinely does create the possibility of an exciting sci-fi style future, as opposed to just trying to recreate the 60s.
You're describing marketing, and marketing of an idea is important - I agree.
However, you also need to have a population that cares about science, engineering, exploration, etc. I don't believe what gets people into engineering and science is because of how engineering and science are marketed. It certainly doesn't harm anything by marketing it, my opinion is that it is a small component of the overall picture.
>I don't think pretty pictures are going to sway public opinion all that much.
James Webb Space Telescope?
Personally, I'm not impressed by SLS or Orion, but that's because the whole project is pork and bull and not worth the money, time, and other irreplacable resources spent.
Would it? I don't personally know anyone who has an 8k display, and I don't know that many people who knew about the SLS launch attempt last week until after it happened
I'll admit up front it isn't the same thing, but go back and watch the video of Musk's car floating in orbit after the Falcon Heavy first launch. It's still impressive as hell to rewatch because its well lit and high quality
Could you: have an array of different satellites orbiting the moon. Have the spacecraft transmit different bits of video to different satellites which all buffer and send the data back when they have line of sight?
Never worked on this domain, so I might be wrong, but what I've heard is that usually for space stuff the hardware is chosen well in advance and "locked". So even if a new shinny thing is out probably it won't make it into the project
Probably because they want cameras they know will work and survive in a deep-space environment. Space is hard. Once you get out of the atmosphere and magnetosphere, it's an unkind environment for electronics. They're probably going to spend the money, effort, and mass on some nice cameras for manned missions, but these are little cameras that mount to the ends of the solar arrays.
It is also probably a data rate issue. They will have higher priority data coming back from the spacecraft, especially for a first iteration, and in the early stages of the mission.
It is quite possible that once things have stabilised that the video and pictures being sent back will improve. For the ispace lander we take much lower resolution images throughout the mission until we have landed and have the high gain antenna in a stable connection.
> A huge part of this program is to generate buzz and interest in the public about the human space program.
Perhaps this is an impossible task. Humans don’t care about space explorers. We continue to have fun with sci-fi, but when we actual humans going to space in real life, it turns out they are just rich ass-holes that we all commonly hate.
Compare this with actual useful robotic missions like the James Webb Space telescope, which sparked huge interests and a ton of excitement.
I think the era of human space exploration died in the 1970s, and any effort to try to revive it are futile.
Very few people who have gone to orbit (actual space) were anywhere near 'rich'.
The reason rich people are the ones funding current space companies is because they are literally the only ones that can do it, other than the largest governments.
SpaceX has generated more buzz than recent NASA work (except maybe Webb) and that will continue once Starship begins ferrying passengers into space.
The high profile cases of recent human space travel is the Blue Horizon which generated a ton of buzz, mostly from people complaining (justly) about how out of touch these people are. I think the sentiment of human space travel extends from there. People cringe from seeing Jeff Bezos spill his champagne after landing and then if they hear about some people going to the ISS they ask: “whats the point?” I think this is a just question and a logical extensions.
Now for the excitement around SpaceX. There was also a ton of buzz around Perseverance. And think people were also quite excited—though not as much—about the Parker solar probe. For future missions I think more people are excited about getting back mars samples from Percy the rover, and about a hypothetical mission to use gravitational lensing from the Sun to photograph surfaces of exo-planets. The hype around Starship seems to me to be inflated by marketing, when talking to space nerds around me there isn’t really that much excitement about what we can achieve with a SpaceX Starship that we can’t with a regular old robotic state funded mission.
Maybe you’re talking to the wrong space nerds? I, for one, am extremely excited for Starship being able to lift relatively huge amounts of mass to orbit per dollar.
> > Very few people who have gone to orbit (actual space) were anywhere near 'rich'.
> Blue Horizon[sic] ... Bezos
Blue Origin has never been to orbit. It's a glorified carnival ride and nobody who knows anything about space or rocketry could mistake it for anything else. Among rocket fans, these 21st century suborbital launches are a laughing stock. Even the 20th century suborbital Mercury-Redstone launches were arguably a pathetic response to Yuri Gagarin's pioneering orbital flight.
No household-name rich person has ever been to orbit.
Astronauts have spent >736,000 hours in spaceflight, risking their lives for humanity, but the parent believes a 10-minute stunt flight carrying an irrelevant passenger is all that matters. I suppose they also dislike the imaginary adorers, and yet they are no different.
Jupiter’s grand tack left us with an asteroid belt right in the middle of the solar system. All our civilizational wealth derives from matter and energy, both of which we find in our cosmic backyard. Billionaire space tourism is a blip on the path to space industry.
Weird interpretations from these results to say the least. “Space Dominance” is nowhere mentioned except in the headline, yet the headline claims that’s what people want (!)
Seeing the results though I see that human space exploration is in the lower tier, just like my previous post was suggesting. More people would rather prioritize normal robotic missions as it seems. More people seem to put some importance to Conducting research to understand space then don’t. This is reverse (i.e. more people don’t think it important to) Research space travels health effect.
A huge part of this program is to generate buzz and interest in the public about the human space program. A large part of that is pretty pictures, to be honest.
The onboard video quality looks like 720p at best and the exposure is for the Orion vehicle, not Earth or the moon. And the video seems horizontally distorted.
I'd have to look, but I'm guessing this is an engineering camera meant to primarily view the physical state of the craft.
That being said, after billions of dollars to get this thing into space, they should have accounted for the need and benefits of better footage.