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

Hi, I'm Matt Melis, I'm a NASA aerospace engineer and I worked on the

shuttle

program for many years and today I'm here with my colleague Kevin Burke who was involved in the acquisition and deployment, about 30 clips that you'll see in just a few minutes um and kevin thank you for being here today I'm glad to be here matt uh what you're going to see is what I consider the

best

of the

best

state- state-of-the-art images in both film and high definition video that the space

shuttle

program is capable of producing today and, uh, not only does it serve a technical purpose, and we'll get into a lot of those details as we go through the uh, the films here, but it also serves as a huge inspirational and educational aspect for all the NASA stakeholders, there are a number of intentions 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 is nearing completion as we move towards final impression of this production.

We also want to pay tribute to the men and women who made all of these images possible over the years of different missions and

launches

that we have had and also. to give a view that not many people see outside of the NASA family of these fantastic images that are used primarily for engineering purposes, and to allow everyone outside of the NASA family to get an idea of ​​what Happens to the shuttle when it

launches

I think this is a very moving set of clips that you are about to see. We're opening here with this somewhat stylized view of one of the launch sequences that will actually play out in the next few clips and I.

I've got a bit of a soft focus on it and thought I'd open it with a couple of fun facts about the shuttle. It really is an incredible piece of equipment, it has a phenomenal amount of fuel that it burns during the eight minutes of its trip to orbit. and when they get there, in those short eight minutes, they're going about five miles per second, which is a pretty spectacular achievement for a piece of machinery, that's how it all happens, that's how the machine does its job and uh, the film says a lot, this is the e19 camera view, we commonly refer to this as echo 19 and it is a 16 millimeter camera with a 10 millimeter field of view for the lens, the focal length of the lens and it runs at 400 frames per second.

So the effective shutter speed is actually 1 1 1200 of a second, yeah, that's pretty amazing, I mean, this is all a slow motion event, uh, and you're basically going to see the six seconds leading up to the launch of the vehicle, uh, like the space shuttle. The main engines turn on now the purpose of this chamber, they all have different purposes, most of these, if not all, of these chambers that you will see in this production are engineering chambers to look at different engineering aspects of the launch process. So the purpose of this is to check to make sure the ignition is working fine, which is what you're seeing here.

The main engine start is happening and you can see the engines are starting one at a time. This particular camera looks. uh, engines number one and three, right, that's what it is, yeah, and um, and so you can see them, they're starting to turn on. Those sparks you see are there to make sure the unburned hydrogen ignites before it floats away. and it builds up somewhere where it can ignite later and cause problems again. You're seeing the engines fire up here and, roughly, we're getting to about five seconds before takeoff, the computers are checking and validating that everything is OK. and uh, there's a little bit of tilt throughout the vehicle as a result of these motors coming off the center of gravity and when the entire vehicle goes backwards and is up in the air, the motors or the thrusters ignite. and this all takes a great picture here, I mean you can see all this flow phenomenon happening inside the engines, now the main space engines are burning hydrogen and oxygen and I'll talk about some of the fun facts about that later. some of the other clips you're going to see, but here you can see that the engines have stabilized and everything is fine and in just a few moments you will see the thrusters firing.

Have we talked about the weather? I don't remember the code, so no, we haven't talked about time code. The timecode that you'll see, the LED display on the right side, is actually placed between the two sprockets, in the 16 millimeter frame and, uh, the timecode is UTC timecode, it's an irigb format. and you will see that it is 9 pm, so it will be utc at 502 p. local time, two minutes and 11 seconds and the three moving digits in the upper right corner would represent one thousandth of a second, the solid number one in the second digit from the top indicates that the timing of the cameras is more of a parameter technician and that is, in each camera, to synchronize the field of view, they have synchronized the time, this is great, you can see some of the oxygen that that vapor cloud had from the oxygen, uh, umbilical fuel, uh, of course, the Solid rocket boosters have now ignited, the entire vehicle is lifting off from the pad and, uh, you can see the glory of this moment.

I mean, an enormous amount of fuel is being burned. One little thing I love is that if you look at the sky in the background, this was a very clear day. These images were selected or these films were selected because of the wonderful photography we did. I went into the state and you can see the deep sky in this dark blue and that's because, as Kevin will talk about later, we go into the color correction that we do after launch to make sure we're capturing everything. this, uh, the events that are happening in all the flow events, so here the vehicles clear the platform and we are on our way.

This view that you're seeing here is the e8 or echo 8 camera and it's a 16 millimeter camera with a 10. millimeter lens, yes, you can see the thrusters now coming off the platform and one of the amazing things that a lot of people don't know about The way the shuttle is bolted to the mobile launch platform is basically via four bolts on each solid rocket booster. and the intent of these cameras is to look at that bolt, which is an explosive arrangement of nut bolts and the bolt weighs about 100 pounds I should say, and these nuts fracture and the bolts get hit into a bracket that you're actually looking at . in the foreground here and they literally release the vehicle from the platform and allow it to take off, so for obvious reasons we have a camera on each of these explosives holding posts and to make sure that they are operating.

They are a critical aspect of the launch process, we want to make sure that they are working well so that you can see that cloud of smoke coming out and in fact, if you want to put the remote in a frame by frame, stop the action, you can actually see . the flash when it explodes uh now Kevin this is where you guys really did a fantastic job of capturing the detail in the column through this automatic aperture on the cameras that you want to talk about a little bit sure uh a lot of the 60 millimeters The cameras that are In the mlp and pad structure they have an automatic exposure control.

It's the only real way to maintain exposure, high dynamic range exposure from pre-ignition of the srbs to takeoff out of the frame. of vision, so the camera is basically on automatic exposure right now, look at this sky on the left and see how it actually gets darker on both sides, you can see how it turns into that deep blue that is the automatic aperture in action right there, a the right. allowing us to see the details in the structure of the platform and also in the flame, yes, I mean, when you see a launch in real life, you can't see any details with the naked eye in the column, it's like looking inside the sun is almost so bright that we can see some of the water from the launch pad, refreshing water coming out, we'll talk about that later and it's splashing on this protective quartz glass that's behind the camera, of course, they're in these. explosion proof containers to keep the cameras safe and sound No cameras were damaged during the making of this film, that's right, the cameras are in an explosion proof box, which is purged with nitrogen and quartz glass in the front protects the lens in most cases, there are some cases where there is damage and if that is the case the lenses will be re-polished, re-polished or whatever is necessary to get them back to condition optimal, in the next view that appears it is uh echo 18 or camera 18 and it is a 10 millimeter lens uh and looking at the tsm or the tail service mast support disconnect yes, there is one umbilical on each side of the orbiter, one for liquid oxygen fuel and another for liquid hydrogen, feeling that they are primary.

For purposes, you can see there are a lot of other instruments on these things, on the feed lines, but the intent of these chambers is to make sure that we get a good retraction. There is actually a huge 20,000 pound mass pulling these things inside the tail service mast. for the door to slam shut and protect them from the hostile environment outside now these umbilicals measure about four feet wide by six feet tall, so you don't really get a sense of scale when you look at them in these movies, but they are as big as an average sized human being, so they are quite large.

One of the interesting photographic challenges we encountered when photographing the disconnection of the TSM aircraft carrier from inside the tail service mast is once the door is closed. It's completely dark there, so there's a set of a series of tungsten lamps that provide illumination and the vibrations, the tremendous amount of vibrations that are induced during takeoff, really vibrate those lights and keep those bulbs from breaking. Quite a challenge, in fact, they are in the process of changing those lights for new LED arrays that provide more stability and less frequency. When the bulbs are turned off before the movie, they are much more resistant to that type of environment. okay matt, this is uh echo001 um and this is one of the four cameras on the edges of the mlp platform.

This camera is in the northeast corner of the mlp platform and is a 16 millimeter camera like all the others. in the mlpr and the focal length of 10 millimeters it is a wide angle view and the effect of the shutter speed is approximately 1 1200 of a second for our viewers. You can see that we're moving away from the vehicle a little bit now that we're taking a slightly wider view, there's the ssmes going off there and you can see the column in the background, growing actually, if you look closely, against the column, you can see a couple of cameras, once you mention what those are.

They are some motv cameras, operational television cameras that are used for vehicle surveillance, they are the uh and they are transmitted live to the launch control complex signals so that the ssmes are firing. In fact, you can see the launch tower on the right side. of the screen and again they continue for about six seconds, the computers are making sure that everything is working and at uh t-minus zero those thrusters will fire and yes, you will see a big cloud of smoke coming out of the flame trench there and It will be sucked back in when the thrusters leave the platform and these two types of structures, one standing just to the left of the left thruster and one just to the right of the right thruster are called rainbirds and uh, there's a pipe, uh, something as well as flat against the launch pad, which connects all these things together, there the thrusters fire and, uh, all this fresh water, 300,000 gallons to be exact, gushes out of those rainbirds and hits the pad launch to dampen acoustic noise and cool the platform so that's where the water in some of these camera shots is coming from and here you can see the uh the aec um the camera's automatic exposure control taking over when the reinforcing column comes into view. and it allows you to see the aec it allows you to see the details both in the column and in the vehicle and the structure itself and you can also see very good details in the mlp cover now we talk a little about the purpose of each of these cameras and this is to look for some structural anomalies in the vehicle, some thermal insulation failures that we may have in the slabs or blankets, etc. and how the water is dispersed on the platform and we're also looking at debris and in fact you can see here we have quite a bit of debris in the field and debris is a big concern for the ferry people and we want to keep an eye on them to make sure we don't have nothing that's happening. to threaten the vehicle, now Matt, you can see this is, well, this is the echo 4 camera. uh e004 is in the corner of the mlp platform and is very similar in field of view to the camera.

We just looked at which of the things. I would like to point out that you can see one of the camera box enclosures thatwe were talking a little bit earlier, on the left side of the frame, right in front of the left srb, yeah, and actually, uh, uh, like we. As mentioned earlier in the article, there are about 125 or so cameras, actually more, documenting any given release, so to be brief in this article and to make it viewable, we had to have a lot of film on the editing room. and it was very difficult for me to crop a lot because I loved all the images.

I'm a fan of any and all cameras uh but that little camera over there didn't get its uh it would stay. the tone that that booster movie had uh we have to have that for the director's cut in the future and uhJust to give you some perspective, this camera originally captured the scene at 400 frames per second, so it plays back at 24 frames, so which is about 1 16 of the speed at which it was actually captured to give us a real-time image. look now you can see here how wonderful the day was and as we mentioned before it was around five in the afternoon so in the film industry they call this magic hour and there is no doubt that this is one of the best moments of the day to take photos of the shuttle they have these intense colors and just a beautiful blue sky to highlight all of this, so I find these images second to none in all the launch images that have been taken.

I have to say that these thrusters throw out about 10,000 pounds of mass per second once they ignite and that's each one, so it's 20,000 pounds combined and you can really feel that incredible magnitude when you look at these pictures, you see a piece of debris. in the right kind of doing a ballet and in slow motion there's a rope mooring some water membranes under the srbs which we'll talk about in a moment, you know, the teams go through this, uh, this is engineering stuff and the teams review this and identify everything they see on it, okay, this is an echo 36 camera and this is, this camera is located on the fixed service structure at the 255 foot level, we mean the structure fixed duty like fss, it's a 16 millimeter camera, uh, with a 16 millimeter focal length lens and the shutter speed effect is about 1200 seconds, similar to some of the others we've seen, this one is a long clip, in fact this is probably the longest clip. uh, that's what I chose for the production.

There's a lot going on here, but it seems a little boring for a while because those engines are on for a long time, so we're still at 400 frames per second here, yeah, yeah. Well, there you see the main engines turning on, you can see all this water pouring into the flame trench, there's a big flash, the hydrogen and oxygen turning on, I have to tell you it's coming out of that external tank, inside, the cryogenic one. propellants liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen 750 gallons per second of liquid hydrogen are poured into that engine group and 280 gallons per second of liquid oxygen, all of these things combine instantly, effectively, to create this fantastic combustion process burning 3000 pounds of propellants to convert turns into water vapor every second and is almost invisible when it leaves the engines, so the engines are turning on now, you can see them glow against the water pouring into the flame ditch, that the water is there mainly to dampen acoustic noise and keep things cool and you've gotten a good look at the belly of the orbiter here.

One of the purposes of this chamber is to look to see if we lose any tiles due to the ignition impact of solid rocket boosters. Now you can see. the thrusters around just a couple of minutes and you see those red ribbed surfaces there inside the flame trench, those are actually membranes to hold water and they will burn up and you'll see that in the movie when the thrusters fire in there, the You see right there and there's water there that's being released and turned into steam, and I guess I'm not sure that it prevents some kind of recirculation of the exhaust on takeoff probably again it makes a dampening acoustic noise and there you see those thrusters firing, if you look in the upper left corner, you see the um, the umbilical, uh, falling back there and then look at how the main space engines are going through that.

That water in the flame trench is really cool yeah this is a pretty dramatic shot and you can see the auto exposure control on the lens like we've talked about in some of the other

views

which really helps to be. able to see the details in the uh the ssmes drilling into that hole as well as look at the column of the srb and see the edge of the uh, the belly of the orbiter also see the ssmes point a little bit outside of uh kilt there and you can see them hitting the top of the mobile launch pad as they rise.

It's amazing that they capture all that detail in the srb pens. It's something good. It's a fantastic clip. It really is. It's a chamber echo. This is on the fixed service structure at the fss at the 255 foot level. It has a focal length of 10 millimeters on the 16 millimeter camera. It's a really interesting view and you know, Matt, do you want to provide more details about what we're seeing, yeah. I can see that the thrusters have already fired and this big umbilical structure that you see swinging back, it's actually very massive, the plate on the end is about a foot and a half by three feet square, you'll see a close up. of that a little bit, that's the um ground umbilical to connect it to the hydrogen tank vent and it's got some nitrogen and helium purge lines and some instruments to go with it, quite a complicated structure, you get a picture. of that in a minute, if you look at the mlp or the mobile launch pad, you'll see all the water coming out of the rainbirds under the launch pad again, our active exposure going in there and giving us a great shot of the columns as a vehicle .

The tower clears, look to the right, you can see a little bit of that burning there, that little blue cone. Fantastic detail, right? Yes, it's a great shot. Echo 40 is one of my favorite shots, Matt, and this one is on the hook. service structure on the fss at the 275 foot level a little higher than the previous two

views

we saw and this is really an amazing view of not only the orbiter but also the beautiful ocean on a late spring day in Florida and an illumination very nice. in the tank and also as you will see on the surfaces of the orbiter yes, it really is a magic hour in this uh, that orange tank for those who are not as familiar with the shuttle that is foam, it is insulating foam in the tank to keep the thrusters Cryogenics are cold on the inside, uh, liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, they're pretty cold when they go into their liquid state.

In fact, you can virtually look inside the cabin here, if you look closely you can see the ocean through the window, just briefly there for a moment. It's fun, there is a discovery in all its glory. This engineering view is looking at any possible problems with the tiles or the vehicle's thermal protection system and looking at that absolutely beautiful, you can see some of the ice flakes. Tracking the vehicle as it moves up. Remember, as we mentioned earlier, that three thousand pounds of water vapor per second comes out of the main space engines in the back.

It's pretty amazing and it's practically invisible. This view is of a structure called the gup, which is the terrestrial umbilical carrier plate that attaches to the terrestrial umbilical carrier assembly, sometimes called a gucker. That plaque measures approximately one and a half feet by three feet. It is a considerable plate. It doesn't really capture the scale in this. and you can see that the vehicle is now up and taking off, that umbilical detaches back right at the separation of the solid rocket booster, its detonation and matte, this is a 33 chamber and this is one in the fss, it's in the 235 foot level, um, and it's using a fairly long focal length lens, you can see from the field of view that it's a long focal length lens and it's now 75 millimeters, if you look, you can see the kind of magnification of the thruster, it's not a continuous step, but it pushes and then slows down a little bit and what you're seeing there is the natural frequency of the thruster's thrust.

I think it was on the order of seven hertz. Seven cycles per second. You can see it go by and hear it. the aft skirt of the thrusters passing by with a very good tight shot of the exhaust, this camera view is on the perimeter of the platform, it is located at camera site 3. it is about 1270 feet away from the vehicle and It is the first in a series of 35 millimeter cameras that will see the next sequences of uh, there is a lens here, the focal length is approximately 500 millimeters and the effective exposure is 1 450 of a second and the camera operates at 180 frames per second, yes, it is a beautiful shot and uh this is going to be like Kevin says first in the 35 millimeter shots they are of a little better quality uh because they simply have more surface area to put an image um you can see the ssmes shooting and uh everything in nominal operation here and as soon as they move away from the platform you will see the left thruster in the background centered between the two service tailmasts and just a beautiful shot right there looking at the steam coming out of the ssmes and this is a Fantastic shot of what's left behind after the vehicle passes the tower is that you have all this water and steam, being pushed around in this incredible hostile acoustic environment, I mean, look what's happening there, this is all acoustic noise and shock coming from the thrusters and the ssmes 63 camera are located on the perimeter of the platform, one of the camera sites is 1270 feet from the vehicle and is using a one hundred 105 millimeter lens, the camera operates at 180 frames per second and that pushes about 630 feet of film through the camera uh per minute uh pretty pretty fast, especially for 35 millimeters, yeah, you can see the sparks getting ready to ignite the main engines and in the background you see the water tower where it came from all that fresh water. to flood the platform to keep it cool and dampen a lot of that acoustic noise that we've already seen what it looks like in the column uh, absolutely beautiful day, really accentuated by this shot, the blue sky in the background blends very well with the uh, the target. exhaust plume coming out of there and, uh, you can see a lot of splashes and things coming out of all different directions at the bottom, you'll see more of those shots coming up.

This shot will be the first of a bunch of different views as we march counterclockwise around the platform to look at it from different angles and there you can see that the thrusters have fired and you see everything coming out the other side of the flame trench and a beautiful shot coming off the platform and the lighting at five in the afternoon on this late spring day is almost perfect from this camera view, of course it won't be perfect for all views, but certainly It's a good angle and it really eliminates the vehicle and also the structure is very good, yes, I like it when the vehicle comes out.

I left a lot of these long shots because I thought it was cool to see what happens next and you can see the whole service structure involved here. steam and exhaust from solid rocket motors now one interesting thing about the 30, this particular 35 millimeter format is that we mentioned before about the time code and the irig time code is recorded with an LED screen and in the 35 format millimeters is actually part of the image area because the 35 millimeter format has four sprockets per frame, so there is no way to place the timecode LED between the sprockets like we can do on the 16 millimeter on the right , so if you look at the 16 millimeter, you could actually see the sprockets at the top and bottom of each frame and those are not visible on the 35, as seen here, the camera number is on the bottom right, bottom right. it shows the time code LED and in this case it is camera number 62, so the 35 millimeter format also allows us to put in a designated camera number which is used quite often just to help with viewing and tracking purposes.

This again is a 105. millimeter lens and is on the perimeter of the platform approximately 1270 feet from the vehicle. Look at the sheer force with which all this stuff comes out of there. I have talked before in the article about how much it is. coming out of the solid rocket propellants twenty thousand pounds combined and then the ssmes are losing three thousand pounds of liquid propellants per second and that really shows here when you look under the launch pad you can see that all of that has nowhere to go , so it's vectored on both sides, so it can be directed safely away from the vehicle, so there's no bouncing or backflow, so to speak, and one thing we haven't had.

One opportunity we will talk about before is how cameras are currently activated, all cameras are activated using the pox for the photo-optical control system that activates all cameras on the perimeter of theplatform in the fixed service structure as well as the mlp and it is quite a sophisticated system to synchronize and activate all the cameras according to the launch clock. Yes, it is undoubtedly a very complex system for all these cameras to work perfectly on each launch. They are very important, if not critical, for shuttle launches and, um, it's amazing. It is an achievement that all the men and women who work on this can do so with such a degree of reliability.

Every launch, another shot here is, like I said, moving counterclockwise. You see that the ssmes or thrusters are just firing. Excuse me and there it is. See the gup moving back as we talked about earlier, the umbilical assembly, this view uses the same 105 millimeter focal length lens as the other two views we just looked at and again it's about 1200 feet from the vehicles where the camera is. the site is located, you know this was a really unusual day because you just mentioned before that you know not from every view the lighting is going to be as good, but this is as good as it gets, I mean every single one of these cameras .

The views are well exposed, both from an engineering and beauty point of view, they are all very, very beautiful shots and that is why we selected 124 to be the predominant content in this film. By the way, in the foreground is the water tower, it is about to be swallowed by the exhaust. This is a dog 68 it's a 35 millimeter camera and it's really meant to be a documentary camera so it runs at 28 frames per second, it's not really a high speed camera so it's almost real time, a real time camera view, it's just a really beautiful shot. and because it's a documentary camera, we can widen the aperture so that the time block doesn't take up the image area and present it in its widescreen view and I think it's pretty dramatic, yeah, from a photography standpoint. beauty, this is probably at the top of my favorites list it's just gorgeous quality, fantastic color saturation and it's very unusual for shuttle photography to be so beautiful at the same time, which is why the echo 55 starts our series of trail cameras.

The echo 55 is mounted on a kineto or ktm tracking mount that we commonly use. refer to it as and is located on cs1 about 1200 feet from the vehicle. This is a good shot because you can see there's a little distortion cloud here that we're shooting through and what's burning hydrogen from the fuel system is burning excess hydrogen to burn it safely and that's what that we're looking at here and it's really beautiful when the vehicle comes out of that and goes into its roll program clearing the tower again, just a fantastically well-lit photograph. On this day, some of the white things that you see falling off, there are paper covers that protect some of the command maneuver system motors, we'll talk about that later, but Kevin, these are all manually operated, I mean, there are beings. humans. behind the scenes doing this tracking now yeah, this uh ktm or kinetic tracking mount has about four cameras mounted on it and this particular echo 55 camera is one of a couple of cameras and it's meant to look at the top half of the vehicle. while the other camera is intended to look at the bottom right of the vehicle and we will see that in the next shot we will have one of the views from the bottom of the stack in the next one, in fact.

Our intention is to have in the deleted scenes on this disc a set of views from pairs of cameras linked together so that you can view them simultaneously, so look for that in the bonus features. This is fantastic now that they are completely finished. with your roll program and kind of on the way, yeah, the intent of that camera shot is just for the first 1200 feet of the climb, it's really the intent of that view and that takes about 18 to 20 seconds I think. Okay, so now this is camera 52 and of course now it's at the bottom of the stack, so it's a little bit of a different view and, but part of a couple of cameras again.

This is, as you said, camera 52 and it is located in place of camera uh two and it is approximately the same distance 1200 feet uh 1270 feet from the vehicle good photo of the ssmes there I am always surprised by how transparent the exhaust coming out of the ssmes now this conetto tracking mount is controlled by an operator manually controlled by an operator who is sitting in the lcc on the second floor below the shooting room and the person who is using a track ball to track the vehicle and is pretty complicated because they're just looking at a little bit of a video monitor and the vehicle is moving much faster in real time than what we're seeing, we're seeing it at, you know, a fifth of the speed in this particular case of, what is it? in real time, this conetto tracking stand also has uh, hdtv cameras that are mounted and that are used for what we will call quick view to see these views in real time and then almost in real time, you know when they start the analysis of images, uh, this is done.

While the film is being processed and transferred, it was a fantastic shot to see the sun passing right between the two columns and it actually gives you an idea of ​​how bright these columns are to the naked eye because the sun when it was passing by was not there. It's much brighter than the columns you saw, a wonderful shot showing the column of fire that the vehicle is rising above and it really contrasts nicely with the blue again, highlighting why sts-124 was really the right mission for be a kind of springboard to show. all the beautiful film this is a 57 camera this is on cs6 again 1200 feet from the platform or so and we are looking at the bottom half of the vehicle as I mentioned earlier the camera is mounted on a tracker a ktm tracker has four or There are five cameras different there and this is the bottom half film camera.

Looking at the bottom of the vehicle, you can see the paper covers coming off the rc motors. Those are tie-down covers, the same type of material you put on your house when you built it. and those covers are there in case there's a storm or a small storm, why the ferry is on the deck, which is not uncommon in Florida and we can't afford to have water inside those engines, so we put those paper covers there and they have These little pairs of inflating sheets tear off the cover and they're just attached with some type of adhesive, so you're going to see a lot of that white paper peeling off during these launch shots.

Beautiful shot looking towards the end of the queue. the stack and possibly in the deleted features or deleted scenes on this disc, we're going to try to edit a piece together showing this pair of cameras, the views of the pairs of cameras put together and it should look pretty good to see. in our deleted scenes, feature on the disc, this is uh echo 225, as you can see, it's already in flight, it's a really interesting sight, it's a mid range trail camera, the mount and camera are located on ucs4, which is about 2.4 miles north of The Pad, one of the reasons I selected this shot to include on the DVD is because I thought it was really amazing and really beautiful how in their role show, as they took on their role , the sun rose as it does.

Here and then you can see the name appear and slowly the whole orbiter lights up with the afternoon 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 can see some variations in the color and you can see that the tiles literally make out the boundaries of the tiles there, so it really is a wonderful piece of footage and a notable contribution to the DVD from a cinematography point of view. The lens that is on the camera is a 150 inch brashear lens, it is a cat eye dioptic lens so it has a mirror surface and it has a focal length of about 4000 millimeters, if you converted the inches to millimeters just for To give it perspective, the weight of this lens is about 250 pounds, just the lens itself is a huge lens and a truly amazing piece of optics.

You can really see a lot of nice textures in this shot on the amp too. If you look at the front of the amp, you can see the access panels and stuff. A large line coming out of the external tank that is actually the oxygen feed line in the external tank which is where those 280 gallons per second of liquid oxygen flow through to the main engines that feed lines about 17 inches in diameter, so which is a pretty robust system and I think another thing to point out here is that the mount for this camera is manually tracked, so the operator looks through a scope at the camera site, throwing vibrations occur around of the hammer head and keeps the vehicle in the center of the frame, and it's pretty It's an incredible feat to be able to do that with such precision, yes, they've done a great job of staying on target every step of the way, now they're Zoom out a little further, obviously, and you can see a kind of glow. of those engines start hitting the bottom of the stack, as they call it, and it lets you know that something is going on in the back of that vehicle, so the next series of shots we're going to look at is the camera views.

HD and in this particular view this is from STS-114 return to flights this was July 26, 2005 and we are about two miles from the platform just south of platform 39b here and the camera is tilted at an angle 45 degrees to allow maximum use of the 16x9 aspect ratio that is available with high definition television cameras. Now it is important for our viewers to look closely in the left window, there you can see Eileen Collins, who commanded this mission. you can see your suit inside the window absolutely incredible and this is the first time, this is the first time on the show that we started using high definition video after Columbia and that was one of the first times we saw this level of detail In the photography. correct, then this particular camera view is ehb225.

This was recorded on sts-117, it was June 2006 and the camera is running at 60 frames per second like all HDTV cameras do. The camera orientation is tilted at 45 degrees to make maximum use of the frame's 16 by 9 aspect ratio to get as much of the space shuttle vehicle in the frame as possible. I chose this particular shot because it is well exposed and shows a beautiful sequence in the roll show, but you also get this really nice vapor phenomenon as the vehicle accelerates to higher speeds and this is not always visible for every launch, It's a consequence of atmospheric conditions, dew point, humidity, etc., so I thought it was a nice touch. this particular image, this is the only long range camera that made the final cut and Kevin will give you the details on that in a moment, but I want you to look at the bottom of the tank there as you saw it as if it was sinking. in flames and you should know that this is a normal phenomenon in a shuttle launch, what is effectively happening here is that the exhaust gases coming out of the srbs and ssmes are expanding into the upper vacuum as they They direct into space and the radiant heat from the expanded columns becomes tall enough to ignite some volatile gases that are trapped in this aerodynamic dead zone, so to speak, at the back of the tank for a couple of moments during the flight, but this is an incredible shot, Kevin, because it's from so far away.

Why don't you explain what we're seeing here? Yes, Matt, the camera here is located at a place called Apollo Beach, it's inside Cape Canaveral National Seashore and the camera stand is about 20 miles north of the platform, so it's quite a distance. distance, this is a 150 inch brashear lens again, about 4000 millimeters, so quite a distance on the trackers, as we mentioned earlier, it is operated manually, says an operator who looks through a scope and uses a ball tracking to maintain the vehicle. in the field of view, yes, it is also difficult for the operator because of the distance to see the vehicle at launch and see the platform.

Yes, you just have to give the light a good squeeze to grab it on the fly and it's quite a lot of skill that needs to be developed to get it right and of course we saw our solid rocket boosters separate which is at the end of what we can see with all the trail cameras. and there you see our thrusters coming out and they separated at about 29 miles altitude about two minutes into the flight and they are recovered by divers in the Atlantic Ocean and although they appear to be receding here, they are actually traveling another about 15 miles up, just falling under its own forward momentum before peaking and then returning to the Atlantic about 150 miles where the diving objects found them.They pick them up and bring them back for refurbishment so this brings us to the end of our production I hope you enjoyed the

commentary

Kevin and I have enjoyed doing it for you today and as the boosters fade away and the external tank and the orbiter continue on their way to orbit, we want to dedicate this film to all the men and women over the 30 or so years of the program who have committed themselves to capturing all of these great images.

It's an incredible job, it requires a lot of commitment and it's extraordinarily difficult to do, and we take our hats off to them. Kevin, thank you for doing this with me, thank you, it's been a wonderful effort and I hope we meet again on the next space show, so goodbye.