These are some of the iconic pieces of launch footage from the space race and the
shuttle program, shots taken that would be impossible for any human to see close
up and personal and many of them were done long before we had miniature
high-definition cameras and high-speed data links beaming the footage live from
space so how did NASA film these incredible shots of Apollo the space
shuttle and beyond. Now as good as these look from an aesthetic point of view
they weren't done just to wow the public, they had a very important engineering
role and that was their primary purpose to show the engineers and scientists
just what was going on at critical stages of the launch and in some cases
like the shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters they were key in finding out
exactly what happened. The story of how these techniques were developed goes
back to the very first long-range ballistic missile the V2, the world's
first CCTV system was developed by Walter bruch in order to observe the
rocket launches from a safe distance in a bunker. At the time there was no way to
record the video footage, so cameraman had to stand within the walled test area
to film the launches, an extremely dangerous place to be so close to
prototype rockets. Major General dr. Walter Dornberger, the V2 project leader
recalled how on one V2 test the rocket launched but then stalled and hovered
about four metres above the launch table, something that normally preceded it
falling back in exploding. About a hundred meters from the rocket and next
of a test area earth wall a cameraman was filming it with a hand-cranked
camera. After about five seconds the rocket started to rise as its fuel was
depleted and it became lighter, it gradually rose up remaining vertical and
slowly travelling sideways towards the cameraman who continued filming till it
passed almost directly overhead at which point he then stopped filming and ducked
down, the rocket exploded a split second later and crashed about 40 meters beyond
the test area wall a remarkable feat of
bravery on behalf of a cameraman who survived unscathed. When the U.S. took
the surviving stock of around a hundred V2's to the White Sands Missile Range
in New Mexico after the war they needed a way to observe and record their test
fights in greater detail and safety than was done before. In 1946 Clyde Tombaugh,
the astronomer who first discovered Pluto 16 years earlier was invited to
come to White Sands to help improving optical instruments tracking of the
Rockets. Tombaugh's team built their tracking system on a world war 2 M/45
quad mount anti-aircraft platform affectionately known as "little bright eyes"
this was because of a binoculars the operator used to manually guide the
field of view along the flight path which were fitted between the five and
six inch reflector telescopes attached to two 35mm cameras
which had replaced the 50 calibre guns. But it wasn't only ground cameras that
were of importance. In 1946 Clyde Holliday an engineer working on the V2 program
modified a 35 mm movie camera to withstand the shock of the launch and
the impact when it came back to earth. On October 24th 1946 the camera which used
Eastman Kodak Super XX film running at 4 frames per second was mounted into an
aluminium case with ten millimeter thick walls and into the body of a V2 rocket
and then launched to a height of a 107 kilometers. This was
the first time that anyone had seen the earth from the edge of space. From here
they could clearly say 1,200 kilometers in all directions in area the equivalent
of 4.1 million square kilometers and they could clearly see the curvature of
the earth. The M-45 platform was used on three further tracking mounts at the
White Sands range and some of the T4 systems are still in use today.
But as America went from testing small ballistic missiles of a mighty Saturn V,
a huge array of different cameras became necessary to check
the complex systems during launch. At the John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida a
concrete launchpad at complex 39a was riddled with fixed high-speed cameras
able to record on for 16mm film at 500 frames per second. By the time of
Apollo 11 there were 201 cameras recording the
launch 119 for engineering and 82 for documentary
purposes. This footage is from camera E8 which was housed within the concrete pad
itself out of line of sight of the engines and pointed at a heat-resistant
mirror made of quartz glass to avoid being destroyed at liftoff. Above the pad
similar high frame rate cameras on gantry's film the Rockets clean
separation from the umbilical connections as for Saturn V cleared the
tower. The ascent was broadcast to a live TV audience worldwide from a camera on a
mount descended from Tombaugh's bright eyes. From the mid-1960s purpose-built
tracking mounts were made by companies like Photo Sonic's, their cine-sextant
optical tracking mount held twin telescopes on powerful motorized
pedestals allowing heavier optics to track the launch at greater ranges. This
footage from Apollo 4 shows the first stage separation and height of 65
kilometers, 211,000 feet and was captured by a
camera on the ground but even with powerful telescopes like this they
couldn't see the detail of what was happening in the rocket itself. To see
this cameras were fitted into the Saturn rocket stages to film a stage
separations. In fact the now iconic separation footage seen here was from
cameras mounted in the base of the second stage and is often shown as part
of Apollo 11 footage but he's actually from Apollo 4. These cameras weren't
used on Apollo 11 due to lack of space available. Apollo 4
was the first unmanned test of a full Saturn V rocket and many things still
remained unknown about how it would react during the launch.
The engineers wanted to see that the stages separated cleanly and that the
interstage structures, that's the smaller ring like object here, didn't hit
the engines during separation as the clearances were very tight. The J2
engines seen in the top of the frame are firing although the hot exhaust plume is
invisible in the vacuum of space but its effects can be seen on the interstage
section as it falls away. On Apollo 6 there were six film cameras and two TV
cameras. The film cameras ran out a 100 frames per second and were
fitted into pods that were ejected from the stage shortly after separation as
you can see here. These would fall back to earth and once they were in the lower
atmosphere they would inflate para-balloons to Slow landing into the sea
and allow them to float. There was also a radio beacon which was activated and
allowed them to be found in the Atlantic Ocean normally around about 600 miles
downrange but not all the pods were recovered. On Apollo 6 only two of the
six were found and in 1964 on mission SA-7 they ended up being ejected into
hurricane Gladys as it made its way across Atlantic. However several weeks
later two of them were washed up undamaged on the islands of San Salvador
and Eleuthera. Whilst some of the cameras filmed the subject directly others were
the first to use fiber optics to remotely place the lenses away from the
actual cameras to film places that will be otherwise inaccessible, like this the
inside of the fuel tanks to see how the fuel reacted in low gravity and how much
it sloshed around during the launch, something that could seriously affect
the Rockets guidance if it was not controlled.
A decade later the tracking mounts again had to catch up with a broadcast of the
first flight of the American space shuttle Columbia. When the shuttle
launched on the 12th of April 1981 the stakes were high, to broadcast the launch
to a TV audience who were now more than ever watching in full color. A government
contract was awarded to the private company
Contraves to deliver a new mobile optical platform which they called the Kineto
Tracking mount or KTM. Like the photo sonic platform these retained the
recognizable format of the M-45 mount however they could either be manned or
set up for remote operation within the launch exclusion zone. Although the new
robotic mounts were greeted with suspicion by the camera operators at the
Kennedy Space Center, 10 mobile KTMs were positioned around the launch center.
short-range optics on these mounts film from T-10 seconds to T+57
seconds with longer range optics capturing until T+165 seconds. This
piece of footage here of the shuttle discovery at T+40 seconds is shot
from a medium distance camera about 3.8 kilometers from the launch pad using a
150 inch lens with a 4,000mm focal length as the shuttle
is accelerating through 20,000 feet. As discovery goes through a 145,000
feet at a hundred and 23 seconds into the flight,
the Boosters separate which is captured here by another 150 inch 4000mm
focal length lens on a KTM. The weight of the lens alone on these was about a
115kg and the tracking to keep the discovery in the
frame was done by a human and not an automated system. After three minutes the
job of filming the ascent was transferred to the largest telescope on
the site the permanently mounted 24-inch aperture Recording Optical Tracking
Instrument or ROTI. With a focal length of up to 12,700mm
ROTI had enough magnification to follow the launch for
up to five minutes after liftoff. ROTI used both radar assisted tracking and a
joystick for manual adjustment, which had such a fine sensitivity but it could
register the heartbeat of the user if held to firmly. During the early shuttle
launches over a 130 cameras were used to record all aspects
of the launch combining 16mm, 35mm and 70mm film formats as well as high-definition video. Film was used even
after the advent of video because of its high resolution an actual wider dynamic
range that's its ability to keep very bright and normally lit objects in the
same scene without them being washed out. The video was used for quick access to
footage whilst the film was being processed. The high speed film cameras
were placed in explosion-proof boxes close to the launch pad to record
different aspects of a flight. Here is camera E-19. It's running at 400 frames
per second with a 10 mm wide angle lens and recording the engine
startup and flame pattern. The cameras were fitted with automatic exposure
control to allow them to film the exhaust plume that from the solid rocket
boosters, which looks as bright as the Sun. You can see how wide the dynamic range this
gives and how well it works when combined with film as in this shot you
have the super-bright SRB exhaust with the blue sky behind it and both are
perfectly exposed. This shot is actually recording the operation of the explosive
hold down bolts, four of which held down each of the SRBs to the mobile launch
pad until the point of liftoff. Another great shot is that of a tail service
mount disconnect from camera E-18 there was one of these on each side of a
shuttle, one for the liquid hydrogen and one for the liquid oxygen. Again the 16mm
camera used a 10 millimeter lens and was running at 400 frames per
second as were most of the engineering cameras on the mobile launch pad. What's
not easily apparent from this shot is the size of a connector. Each one was 1.2
meters wide by 1.8 meters high that's bigger than most house doors. They were
pulled in with a force of 9,000 kilograms before the protective blast
doors dropped down. One of the biggest challenges was that once the door was
shut it was pitch black inside so they had to be lit by tungsten
but the vibration was so strong but it would blow the filaments in the lamps so
on the latest missions LED lighting is now used instead. Cameras were also vital
to the investigation of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. As the space
shuttle Challenger rose into the sky on the icy morning of January 28th 1986 the
high frame rate cameras on the launch tower filmed a puff of gray smoke
escaping from the side of the right solid rocket booster but by the time the
pictures were examined it was far too late.
17% of all Americans were watching including millions of schoolchildren as
challenger broke up 73 seconds after launch broadcast live the footage of STS
51- L remains among the most unforgettable tragic for the space
program. During the investigation of the disaster footage from NASA's tracking
cameras was essential to identifying the sequence events during challengers last
flight with the ROTI's high magnification the burst of superheated
gas from the SRB can be seen and during the explosion the individual elements of
the orbiter can be identified including the crew cabin which was designed to
survive much greater pressures than the fuselage and was only destroyed on
impact with the ocean surface below. Such tragic accidents led to wider use of
cameras for each launch with a number of KTMs increasing to 14 following but
Columbia Shuttle disaster in 2003 with the return to flight in 2005 STS-114 had
over 400 cameras monitoring the launch on this launch rocket cam would be used
for the second time this is a camera system that is fitted to the outside of
the SRBs and the main fuel tank. At about 127 seconds into the flight a large
piece of debris about 92 centimeters by 27 centimeters was caught by a rocket
cam falling from the main fuel tank but luckily not hitting anything.
20 seconds later another smaller pace hit the right wing but after checking
with the orbiter boom sensor system, it was found not to have caused any damage.
Rocketcam is now used on most launches and is responsible for the amazing
external footage of things like booster separations and the landing of the
SpaceX reusable rockets. The return to flight also used high-definition cameras
aboard the B-57 canberra aircraft at an altitude of 60,000 feet over 18
kilometers for WB 57 ascent video experiment was able to film a shuttle
even in overcast weather tracking the launch over a 643 kilometre path into
space. So what's your favourite piece of launch footage let me know in the
comments below and maybe you're one of the amateur rocketry servers or one of
the workers of the Kennedy Space Center it will be great to hear your views in
the comments. This was also another video voted for by
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