Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/artemis-ii-will-use-laser-beams-to-live-stream-4k-moon-footage-one-giant-step-beyond-the-s-band-radio-comms-of-the-apollo-era

by speckx • 4 months ago

374 151 4 months ago

tomshardware.com

xattt3• 4 months ago

Hopefully, the footage is better than the missed pan up at lift-off, and showing spectators at the time of booster separation.

I understand funding cuts and all, but this is a once-in-a-generation moment and it’s filmed with no apparent effort whatsoever.

piyh• 4 months ago

Crazy that a dude from Iowa and his ragtag group of rocket watchers does a better job with launch coverage than NASA. I can't believe they cut away during booster separation. Absolute shit show.

therouwboat• 4 months ago

maybe they should turn back and do it again

reaperducer5• 4 months ago

Crazy that a dude from Iowa and his ragtag group of rocket watchers does a better job with launch coverage than NASA.

You may not have noticed, but NASA was also launching an actual rocket at the time. Conducting a livestream and conducting a livestream while launching a rocket to the other side of the moon are hardly equivalent.

Absolute shit show.

You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show."

z33b• 4 months ago

The camera and simulation footage were a bit of a letdown and something SpaceX does much better. On the other hand NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form where science takes precedence over presentation. For that money however I concur - I expected more. Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for it

ceejayoz2• 4 months ago

I suspect this is a frequency thing. Early SpaceX broadcasts were pretty rough. NASA just doesn't do launch coverage with the same sort of cadence.

Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

SV_BubbleTime4• 4 months ago

NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form

For real?

I was rolling my eyes hard at:

    GC systems go?

    GC systems go for all for humanity!

And then the VERY scripted pre-launch speeches. It’s like everyone there had been taking notes from inspirational hero movies.

It’s cool. But let’s not act like going around the moon is the most historic thing ever… since we’ve already done it plenty, right?

IshKebab• 4 months ago

evoke a feeling of substance over form...

The feeling it evoked in me was that a multi billion dollar PR program could surely afford to spend a little bit of money on reliable camera tracking, telemetry overlays, visualisations that run at more than 0.1 FPS, etc.

Absolutely bizarre.

TeMPOraL3• 4 months ago

Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for it

Livestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really should be using KSP for it - it's not hard to wire up with external telemetry, and with couple graphics mods, it looks way better than whatever expensive commercial professional grade simulator rendering they're using (which I suspect is part of a package that may be really, really great at simulations - and is intentionally not great at visuals of this kind, as it doesn't show anything that isn't directly representing some measurement).

mrguyorama• 4 months ago

Even SpaceX is only okay with their broadcasts. They normalized showing very little data and spending the whole time with talking heads that don't say anything.

Go look what the livestream was like for the Mars Curiosity rover, it was fantastic, and that was on a mission taking place 8 minutes away. Their simulation was mostly Demo data for some parts of the mission, but included such things as what part of the control program it was in! It was even a good rendering. I screenshotted it for a desktop background.

But the camera quality is so low and I don't get it.

It seems like the entire industry has just ignored the lessons of old: "Get someone who does this for a living". They should have connections and partnerships with movie companies who actually know how to run cameras. That shouldn't be expensive nowadays, as that knowledge seems to be cheap enough for Youtube creators.

herodoturtle• 4 months ago

I’ve read elsewhere that the cut-away during booster separation was intentional given the high risk manoeuvre.

If something went wrong / explosion etc, then they wouldn’t want to broadcast it.

Something to that effect. I’m paraphrasing someone else.

_moof4• 4 months ago

Don't they usually manage that by having the broadcast be slightly delayed?

trompetenaccoun2• 4 months ago

Artemis has a budget of over 90 billion dollars, it's more than 4 billion for that Artemis II launch (as estimated by NASA, possibly more because they don't even know exactly how much they're spending). For that price one might reasonably expect a couple of quality cameras for the public to be able to view what their money was spent on. For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!

NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.

meatloaf_man• 4 months ago

For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!

With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??

gorgoiler• 4 months ago

From what I have heard, the standard rebuttal to NASA expense is that they are ploughing money into the ground to grow new things the hard way.

The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.

NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.

PaulKeeble• 4 months ago

They missed it pulling off the pad, they then had a picture of the plume, the wide shot off the pad was quite a bit too late also, then they missed the separation of the boosters and the upper stage separation.

Honestly it looks like they intentionally missed every high risk procedure intentionally and cut back a few seconds after it had succeeded.You don't make this many mistakes one after the other accidentally, its easier to do this right than wrong, cutting to the crowd as booster separation occurs was clearly intentional. I take this as NASA had very little confidence in this launch and was avoiding showing all the moments it could go wrong live.

losteric• 4 months ago

That’s so conspiratorial. They could just stream with a slightly delay to interrupt the feed on disaster. I think it’s way more likely they just didn’t have a good broadcasting team.

merrychristmas1• 4 months ago

No, after talking to NASA people, this is just incompetence.

the_af2• 4 months ago

Agreed. There was high quality alternative streaming from other sources, how come NASA couldn't get their shit together? The spectacle is important for public support!

I still don't understand why they didn't show the final 10 seconds countdown, basically the most iconic moment of any launch. They literally hid the clock! I was hoping to count it down with my family.

If they were scared of accidents they could have streamed it with a delay.

dylan6046• 4 months ago

Clearly, you've never worked with a live video crew. If they have no practice, it's amazing how bad you can appear with a lack of appreciation of how fast things move. You also have to remember the camera/operator are really far away with a very large zoom. Things leave your field a view much faster than anticipated. After that, any correction becomes over corrections again because of the zoom factor. Also, I would not be surprised if people were watching IRL as much as their screens/viewfinders.

I've seen it in sports where someone just not up to speed is always behind the play and the center of action is just out of frame. At that point, you zoom out some to recenter and then zoom back in. Or the director cuts away and lets you catch up. But that's assuming competency up the chain.

moffkalast• 4 months ago

Minimum effort has always been NASA's approach to online streaming tbf, 720p potato quality cameras with lots of mission control static shots. I think SpaceX were the first ones to provide anything at full HD with relevant stuff being shown at all times.

ourmandave• 4 months ago

They had 4000 people cut in 2025 and big budget cut in 2026.

Maybe that included the camera crews and equipment.

ddtaylor3• 4 months ago

Why isn't NASA hiring a normal production company?

whycome• 4 months ago

It’s not rocket science, it’s media production/direction.

ErroneousBosh2• 4 months ago

missed pan up at lift-off

Tilt up. Pan is from side-to-side, and the word comes from "panorama".

dylan6046• 4 months ago

Yeah, but if you've got your phone in portrait mode for the socials, you are panning relative to the the landscape orientation.

ck23• 4 months ago

if you haven't seen the footage from someone in a passenger jet nearby, it rocks

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1sagcc1

https://v.redd.it/l11tehzzvrsg1/CMAF_720.mp4

Think about how much technology evolved to create that scene, to fly nearby and being used to take that video, wow

ddtaylor3• 4 months ago

You can't really see anything in that video. The craft is very small on screen.

realsharkymark• 4 months ago

My first thought is SpaceX and Elon would have done this so much better.

I felt I watching the launch through someone's iPhone.

PunchyHamster3• 4 months ago

SpaceX did it worse for a while, took them some launches to be better

_moof4• 4 months ago

NASA's public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.

bentt• 4 months ago

It took SpaceX a number of goes to get their camerawork and streaming right. NASA just hasn’t done this frequently enough.

SergeAx• 4 months ago

They have all the footage, just not in real time. We are now seeing it being processed and uploaded.

SoftTalker• 4 months ago

never-before-seen views of “the far side of the Moon“

I guess not counting all the prior "views" that have been recorded since the Apollo missions, including Chinese orbiters which (according to Wikipedia) "scanned the entire Moon in unprecedented detail, generating a high definition 3D map that would provide a reference for future soft landings"

firesteelrain• 4 months ago

A more accurate claim would be: never-before-seen in real-time at that fidelity from lunar distance.

SV_BubbleTime4• 4 months ago

Real time has to be about the most useless factor here. I don’t care if it’s a year delayed, it’s not like I was going to head up there myself.

venusenvy47• 4 months ago

The article talks about the normal blackout window of 40 minutes on the far side. I'm confused about how they will get real time footage from that side. Is there a lunar relay satellite that wasn't mentioned?

fxtentacle• 4 months ago

Those were transmitted offline so they didn't have authentic NVENC H264 compression artifacts. Never before have you seen it with 260 Mbps ;)

procflora2• 4 months ago

This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.

The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.

It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.

I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/a2-reference...

dotancohen2• 4 months ago

But Artemis II launched during passover - so a day before the full moon. That means that for a 10 day mission, the flyby will be four days after the full moon. And the flyby is necessarily on the far side of the moon, that's how physics works. So they'll be passing over the far side of the moon four days after a full moon - the far side of the moon will be in almost complete darkness. Not even Earthshine lights the dark side of the moon when it is full.

vibe42• 4 months ago

NASA's rendering of the flyby:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_fly...

Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !

albertzeyer• 4 months ago

Is that real-time or sped up? This video is about 1 minute. How much real time does it correspond to?

cloche• 4 months ago

Artemis II is expected to be behind the moon for about 30-40 minutes. Around half-way in the video you can see Earth pass behind the moon in about 1-2 seconds. So yes, it's sped up considerably by a factor of around 2000x

bnchrch• 4 months ago

This in particular warmed my grumpy heart after the best footage of the launch came from a commercial airliners windows.

I had assumed they would've had a better plan to film the entire departure from orbit yesterday.

I'm at least happy they have one for the loop around the moon.

bspammer• 4 months ago

I think the actual best footage of the launch was from Everyday Astronaut on youtube, including a great shot of the booster separation

https://www.youtube.com/live/QOsSRRBMNoc?t=6h49m36s

samschooler• 4 months ago

Here's another launch video uncut: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWm1pXNAOh6/

brcmthrowaway2• 4 months ago

How does laser communication work with a moving object with 9DoF?!

sbarre• 4 months ago

Apparently with a gimbal and some fast-moving mirrors.

https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/lincoln-laboratory-laser-communi...

beloch• 4 months ago

It also helps that laser beams diverge. By the time it gets back to Earth, the diameter of the beam from Artemis is probably several hundred meters, if not several kilometres. Their aim still needs to be fairly precise, but they're not trying to hit a lens with a beam that's still the width of a pencil. They really just need to paint the neighbourhood that NASA's sensors are located in.

kotaKat• 4 months ago

Just like this, a Starlink gimbal being tested for future third party laser comms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpFfC9WY0qs

brcmthrowaway2• 4 months ago

Doesnt look very precise.

functional_dev• 4 months ago

I was wondering about this too! I did not know how they can aim a laser from so far at a moving spaceship.

I generated this visual map about to help me understand it - https://vectree.io/c/aiming-space-lasers-gimbals-and-beam-di...

yardie2• 4 months ago

A reminder that the illegal DOGE took a chainsaw to NASA personnel last year. If you're disappointed that the feed update wasn't as polished as a SpaceX launch it's because the later has an actual communications and marketing department with a budget.

sentientslug• 4 months ago

I really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right time…

quentindanjou• 4 months ago

Less budget = less tooling + less competant people

So actually, yes, it could have affected it. Did it really? We will never know.

Also NASA has less experience in this than SpaceX, hopefully it will be better next time!

dboreham• 4 months ago

Presumably they had more than one camera and the fault was with people in the booth.

yardie2• 4 months ago

panning up at the right time…

I've watched hours of athlete parents try to track their athlete kid and it's marginally useful at best. Lots of shaky cam even at Pop Warner football speeds. So panning at the right time, with the muscle control to keep the object centered, is harder than you think.

If they have a professional videographer on staff working that camera it almost certainly would have never happened. Elon, who was in charge of DOGE, didn't take communications and marketing seriously so I'm almost certain they were one of the first to be let go.

reaperducer5• 4 months ago

I really don’t think budget cuts prevented the camera operator from panning up at the right time

Tilting is up and down.

Panning is left to right.

You can't pan up, unless you've fallen over.

bisby• 4 months ago

There are plenty of ways that money could have solved this though.

More thorough prep/training for camera operators, so they can pan the camera according to a plan, instead of by reaction.

Maybe this camera operator wasn't supposed to pan because it was trying to capture diagnostic imagery that wasn't really intended for viewers, but because of budget cuts, they opted to use diagnostic views as presentation views.

Maybe there was supposed to be a cut to a different camera. But the production room was not sufficiently staffed to coordinate the switch.

Maybe there was no broadcast plan at all and it wasn't clearly coordinated who should be taking what shots.

Maybe they were underpaying the operators and they were not qualified.

Maybe they were underpaying the operators and a single operator was stuck operating multiple cameras and was framing a different camera at the time.

Automated tracking systems.

Sure, it's very likely that this might have happened anyway, but there are a lot of ways that reducing budget reduces planning and coordination. Especially if there is enough budget squeeze to move funds from public support campaigns (this entire stream was a public support campaign) to critical things (like building a rocket).

lysace• 4 months ago

I remember NASA broadcasts being top notch up until the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. That stabilized footage from when the shuttle was landing is iconic.

However: That quality was lost earlier than last year. Not sure exactly when, but it been like this for years now.

PKop2• 4 months ago

This is nonsense excuse making. Regardless of how much money you want NASA to have, are you not yourself upset that the billions they do get were not sufficient to use cameras correctly? How much money do you think it costs to do this right?

adamsb6• 4 months ago

Jared could have reached out to Everyday Astronaut and probably gotten his crew to do it just for the shoutouts on the official stream.

Gagarin1917• 4 months ago

Why does the article keep mentioning footage “from the surface of the moon”?

hartator• 4 months ago

AI knows what really people want to see.

Cider9986• 4 months ago

"will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps..."
"will be used to beam 4K moon footage at up to 260 Mbps."
"Data rates of 260 Mbps can be achieved..."

I wonder what size stream will be available to us. The largest I see in general is 70-90 Mbps for a 4k Bluray Remux and that includes lossless audio. I imagine they would want as much data as possible—significantly more than would be visible to the human eye.

Neywiny2• 4 months ago

Hopefully something nice. I don't think I've ever seen a 4k bluray but fine detail such as stars and dirt tend to get disturbed in compression pretty quickly.

ssl-33• 4 months ago

For us, live? Not much -- probably just whatever it is that YouTube provides for. At a glance, that's officially 40Mbps or less. (My anecdotal experience suggests that it is much, much less.)

But NASA's own in-house stream probably won't consist of 260 Mbps of video, either. Keeping headroom available during streams is important on packet-switched networks, which I [perhaps erroneously] assume this is.

(Later on, after the fact? That's what FOIA requests are for if you want to see every recorded bit. It will certainly come at a price, but if a person wants to compare the received friggin-laser-beams stream to that which the on-board video systems recorded internally, then it should be possible.)

jascenso• 4 months ago

260 Mbps for 4K seems to be awfully a lot for a single stream. Really makes me wonder what has been used for compression ...

dawnerd2• 4 months ago

Almost for sure would be multiple camera feeds. But also wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a bitrate that high. I had a Sony camera that did 100mbps and that was just a prosumer camera.

hedgehog• 4 months ago

For the raw footage of something with as much contrast as the moon against a backdrop of space it would make sense to use a format like ProRes that preserves more dynamic range.

rumblefrog• 4 months ago

That number is the total bandwidth for the O2O link.

ck23• 4 months ago

Didn't Nokia put a 4G cell node up there?

Who is going to be the first to make a smartphone call from the moon?

Lag won't be too bad, just 1.5 seconds or less

BenjiWiebe• 4 months ago

2.2-2.7 seconds of delay due to light speed alone (so maybe a few ms more for electronics and en/decoding).

danny_codes• 4 months ago

Hopefully it’s not cloudy

saltybytes• 4 months ago

Forgive my bluntness asking this question: how hard can it be to put a stationary "satellite" as a communication relay next to the moon to bridge the "dark window" with the space craft?

Insanity• 4 months ago

Well technical difficulty is one piece. Cost and ROI are a different one.

sho_hn• 4 months ago

It's doable (and has been done), but is not entirely easy or cheap. Without getting into the orbital mechanics/whys, a "geostationary" orbit around the moon is not available (it exists but is further out than the Hill sphere and not stable). You can park a relay semi-stably at Earth-Moon L2, but still need station-keeping burns. The moon has has a very lumpy gravity field, so any kind of orbit needs station-keeping eventually.

It's just not super worth it.

If you want to look at a mission that did this, see China's Queqiao.

lexicality• 4 months ago

Orbital mechanics and "next to" don't go together particularly well, so it's not quite as easy as popping something up there.

The Chinese have put Queqiao-1 in the earth-moon L2 point which seems to be working out for them, but I guess the Americans aren't likely to be asking permission to use it.

_moof4• 4 months ago

We have DSN already. As for the moon, it is a nightmare to orbit. Its density is very lumpy, which means orbits around it are constantly being perturbed, and that means you need to bring an annoying amount of propellant if you want to remain stable.

egberts1• 4 months ago

Still want to know what happened in first 10 second of launch, why were the videos fuzzy and cutting out (at least twice)????

runnr_az• 4 months ago

How accurate does the laser have to be to hit the base station?

1970-01-01• 4 months ago

The Alan Parsons Project is going 4K?

johnea2• 4 months ago

What a cluster fuck 8-/

This is how we spend billions of $ and accomplish, nothing.

But, at least we'll have 4K, hi-res, laser beam, video of accomplishing nothing.

And, we can all look forward to spending even more billions to do nothing on Mars!

WTF?!

johnea2• 4 months ago

Manned space flight is the biggest impediment to space science and exploration, both technically and financially.

screenshotapi• 4 months ago

This is amazing. This is a slow burn but live view from Orion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RwfNBtepa4

ra• 4 months ago

Artemis II live location: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/

goodthink• 4 months ago

With all of the big deal being made about viewing the far side of the moon, you would think they would have performed the mission when the moon is _new_ so the far side would be illuminated...

Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

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