Space shuttle launch: From the booster rockets' point of view

Reader pbump spliced together this fabulous video from NASA footage taken by the cameras mounted on Discovery's two solid rocket boosters. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on here, so let me help you get oriented a bit:

We're talking about the two big white rockets that sit on either side of the space shuttle's orange central fuel tank. Each of these rockets has two cameras. One points down (from launch orientation), looking at the nose of the space shuttle. The other points up, looking at the underside of Discovery's wings. All four cameras are represented in this video, with the down-facing ones (Right and Left Forward) in the top two squares, and the up-facing ones (Right and Left Aft) in the bottom squares.

You might think that the moment of launch would be the coolest part of this video. You'd be wrong. For maximum awesomeness, skip ahead to the point where the solid rocket boosters separate from the rest of the shuttle and fall back to Earth. There's some great shots of tumbling through the void of space, and some exciting scenes of splash-down that must not be missed.

Rob posted footage from one rocket booster camera on a launch last August, but I think this four-way full view adds some nice perspective.

UPDATE: This wasn't the last shuttle launch after all. Apologies. I hadn't seen the new flight plan. Headline is fixed.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Brook

It’s also fun to watch in-cockpit video of a launch. Here’s one from a Columbia mission:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwfsFtpACFw&tracker=False&NR=1

The astronauts get shaken around quite a bit when the boosters ignite. It’s pretty cool to watch after the boosters separate: the g-forces gradually increase as they get further into the flight. You can watch the seats of the astronauts slowly lean back, then jump forward as the engines cut off. There’s also some interesting audio commentary in which you can hear the astronauts grunting from the high g-loads.
SAMO1415

Some people ‘dislike’ these videos on youtube. What’s to dislike?

Unless they’re sad about Discovery’s retirement…
- Guysmiley
  
  Youtube comments/votes are usually formed by distilling human stupidity, I try not to look at them.
Doctor Device

I think my favorite shot is just after separation, when the rockets start their tumble, and you briefly see the shuttle and external tank racing away.
- dculberson
  
  Yeah!! It reminds me of skydiving; I didn’t “arch” right so I tumbled a bit and got to see the airplane zooming away (well, to be accurate, it was me falling) until I did arch. Seemed really cool to me at the time, but the instructor strapped to my back confided that it was dangerous. Whoops.
alllie

I can see why the shuttles are being retired. The bottom of Discovery looks like an old clunker, beaten up with repair on repair on repair. And apparently the new parts don’t match the old parts.
- Anonymous
  
  FYI, They replace the heat tiles individually as needed, the seems between them are quite intentional and filled. The individual tiles change color upon re-entry so you can tell the new ones because they are still dark black.
Capissen

This is beautiful and amazing footage, but while this past launch may have been Discovery’s last, it’s not the last for the program. The last space shuttle to go up will be Atlantis, scheduled for late June: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/schedule.html
jaejae

Great video, thanks for sharing it! I have to say that this isn’t the last shuttle launch, though; just Discovery’s.
betatron

Yay!! only two more shuttle launches before we can beg the Russians to please please let us put our astronauts in orbit!! WOOHOO!!

I’m well aware of why the shuttles are being retired and i’m fine with that — relieved actually–, but I’m more than a little bit annoyed that we managed to stumble-fsk our way for THREE DECADES without having built a replacement.

Everyone gets that right? To belabor the point

Last shuttle flight == ask Putin’s permission to launch our astronauts into space.
- snorcup
  
  Maybe, kinda, for a minute….
  
  We went to FL last Feb. to see Endeavor fly, and if you remember that’s around the same time a lot of the NASA budget announcements were being made.
  
  Florida’s “Space Coast” is a small chunk of the world that has done nothing but shoot shit into space since the 50′s or 60′s. There’s an economy and an infrastructure down there based on launching vehicles into space.
  
  We may need to ask the Russians to courier a few care packages and Astronauts back and forth, but I really believe that the private sector is going to step their game up and take a more active role.
  
  Space X already launched and recovered their “Dragon” space capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, and they did it from Cape Canaveral AFB, which is adjacent to NASA’s facility on the Space Coast.
  
  I’m a geek, I like the space shuttle, and I’ll never forget it, but I think NASA’s model is old, outdated, and terribly expensive.
  
  Give NASA some respect, let them keep their dignity and continue to innovate, but let the price sector start handling the “routine” trips to LEO.
igpajo

That Money Shot from 2:25 to 2:35 is just breathtaking!
Wordguy
I was confused by the view descriptions. I think the cameras are:
- Upper left of video = Mounted high on shuttle’s starboard side, looking down/back at shuttle’s tail.
- Upper right of video = Mounted high on shuttle’s port side, looking down/back at shuttle’s tail.
- Lower left of video = Mounted low on starboard side, looking up/forward at shuttle’s nose.
- Lower right of video = Mounted low on port side, looking up/forward at shuttle’s nose.
von Bobo

I agree with snorcup. do we really want to see NASA turn into the Greyhound bus of earth orbit?

It’s time to trust each other and move forward. The russian space program needs NASA to survive, they aren’t competitors any longer, the cold war is a historical blip. Progress should have no patience for fear.
- Anonymous
  
  While I think you’re right that there’s lots the private sector can do for spaceflight, I think we should mention that “because it’s boring” isn’t a reason for a government agency to stop doing something. I mean, there’s lots of stuff that’s best done by governments precisely because there’s no profit in them.
  - von Bobo
    
    No profit? That’s not the story the private investors are spinning.
    And if it doesn’t work out, then forget it! If it’s not sustainable, then lets not waste our resources (your money) on it just because a small portion of society is romantic about the idea.
    
    As for the other concerns about the gap between shuttle and the next vehicle, one could say that our country is already in that gap ever since the shuttles started having failures. And what’s the worst that happened when the shuttles were grounded? Anything at all?
    
    The U.S. will be fine.. there are many many more terrible things out there in the world to be mortified about, if one chooses.
Anonymous

Amazing how stable the cameras are. You’d expect a lot more shaking considering all the forces involved.
Anonymous

If folks enjoyed those shots, I highly encourage you to check out NASA’s YouTube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/ReelNASA

If you’re looking to search through mission photos, you can use the photo search engine here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/

(As a reminder, all photos and videos found on NASA web resources are non-copyright, unless specifically marked. http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html So feel free to find an awesome space shot and print it out. One of my personal favs is: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-118/html/iss015e22323.html)

If you’ve got a decent amount of bandwidth to spare, there is a website that collects various videos from each Shuttle mission, some of them in HD. It doesn’t have the best interface, but it has the feeds pulled straight from NASA TV. http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/

Also, some Astronauts tweet on a regular basis, including some nice pics. You can follow them here: http://twitter.com/nasa_astronauts

Enjoy!
MatthewFabb

Note originally Discovery was going to be the last Space Shuttle launch, but NASA has since scheduled 2 more launches this year. Discovery has been retired, but Space Shuttle Endeavour and Space Shuttle Endeavour are scheduled to go up again.

Here’s NASA’s current schedule:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/schedule.html
- cinemajay
  
  That’s Endeavor and Atlantis, yes?
Anonymous

“shots of tumbling through the void of space”
Really? Seems like a little over half way though.
220000 ft != 328083 ft or even 400262 feet

SRB seperation != KÃ¡rmÃ¡n line or re-entry altitude

thanks wikipedia!
scissorfighter

Did anyone notice that there’s a big chunk missing from the video in the upper-left? At about 2:42 the timecode on the video fades from 141 sec to 280 sec, and then that clip is out of sync with the rest. I didn’t notice it until I checked out the source footage from NASA, which has the same cutout. Why did NASA cut those 140 seconds? Did something embarrassing happen? The two cams on the other tank are continuous, but BOTH right SRB cams are black for those 2+ minutes.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=68551231
- betatron
  
  If you watch the superslo-mo of a launch posted here (/.?) a couple months ago, you can see the flaming skeleton of an unlucky seagull blowing across the platform. Easy to miss.
- alllie
  
  Did anyone notice that there’s a big chunk missing from the video in the upper-left? At about 2:42 the timecode on the video fades from 141 sec to 280 sec
  
  I did notice the streak of the UFO at 1:55-59 in the lower right frame, but you have to do the scroll manually to see it.
  
  But really, what was that?
awjtawjt

Unfortunately it looks bad not to have heavy lift for human spaceflight in the US for a while. But the next step is to be engineering vehicles for long range missions rather than staying concentrated on low earth orbit. The USA is the only nation currently able to do that piece. If we stay stuck on low earth orbit forever, we won’t be able to accomplish the trips to Mars and Europa that we need to be concentrating on. I want a picture of an Europanaut riding a methane whale.
- betatron
  
  My great fear is that, once given up, we’ll never get around to manned space flight again. Particularly so in the current budget/political/not-terribly-intellectual climate. I just have this nightmare of American science and technological acumen swirling around the bowl.
  
  Oh, and why do the Europeans get their own moon when they can’t even orbit an astronaut???