Hi. I'm Matt Melis.
I'm an aerospace engineer for NASA, and I worked
on the shuttle program for a good number of years.
And I'm here with my colleague today, Kevin Burke,
who participated in the acquisition and deployment
of the 30 or so clips that you're going to see
in just a few minutes.
Now - and, Kevin, thanks for being here today.
Glad to be here, Matt.
What you're going to see is what I consider to be the best
of the best state-of-the-art imagery on both film
and high-definition video
that the Space Shuttle Program is capable of producing today.
And not only does it serve a technical purpose--
and we'll get into a lot of that detail as we get
into the movies here--
but it also serves as enormous inspirational
and educational aspect for all of NASA's stakeholders.
[ Pause ]
There's a number of intents that 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 it's nearing completion as we go
to final print with this production.
We also want to pay tribute to the men and women that made all
of this imagery possible over the years of different missions
and launches that we've had; and also to give a view
that not very many people see outside the NASA family
of these fantastic pictures that are used largely
for engineering purposes; and to let everyone on the outside
of the NASA family have insight as to what goes
on with the shuttle when it launches.
I think this is a very moving set of clips
that you're about to see.
We're opening here with this somewhat stylized view of one
of the launch sequences that actually is going to play
out in the upcoming clips.
And I've got a little soft focus on it
and thought we would open it up with a couple
of fun facts about the shuttle.
It really is an amazing piece of equipment.
It has a phenomenal amount of fuel that it burns
over the 8 minutes during its trip to orbit.
And when they get up there in that short 8 minutes,
they're going about 5 miles a second,
which is a pretty spectacular achievement
for a piece of machinery.
So this is how it all happens.
This is how the machine does its job.
And the film speaks volumes.
[ Pause ]
This side is camera view E19.
We've commonly referred to this as Echo 19.
And it's a 16-millimeter camera with a 10-millimeter field
of view for the lens, the focal length of the lens.
And it's running at 400 frames a second.
So the effect of shutter speed is really 1/1200 of a second.
Yeah. It's pretty amazing.
I mean, this is all a slow motion event.
And, basically, you're going to see the 6 seconds prior
to launch of the vehicle
as the space shuttle main engines turn on.
Now, the purpose of this camera,
they all have different purposes.
Most of these-- if not all of these--
cameras that you're going to see
in this production are engineering cameras,
to look for different engineering aspects
of the launch process.
And so the purpose of this one is to check
to make sure ignition is going off okay,
which is what you're seeing here.
Main engine start is just happening,
and you can see the engines are starting one at a time.
This particular camera looks at engines number 1 and 3, right?
Is that what this is?
Yup. And so you can see them.
They're starting to fire up.
Those sparkers that you see are there to make sure
that any unburned hydrogen gets ignited before it floats around
and collects in some place
where it can ignite later and cause problems.
Again, you're seeing the engines sort of turn on here.
And so we're roughly coming into about 5 seconds before liftoff.
The computers are checking and validating
that everything's a-okay.
And there's a little bit of a pitch
over that the whole vehicle does as a consequence
of these engines thrusting off the center of gravity.
And when the whole vehicle snaps back and it's straight
up in the air, the engines-- or the boosters--
ignite and the whole thing takes off.
Great, great photography here.
I mean, you can see all this flow phenomenon going
on inside the engines.
Now, the space shuttle main engines are burning hydrogen
and oxygen.
And I'll talk about some of the fun facts about that later
on in some of the other clips that you're going to see.
But here you can see the engines have stabilized
and everything is a-okay.
And, in just a few moments,
you'll see the boosters fire off.
Did we talk about the time code?
I can't remember, so...
No, we haven't talked about the time code.
The time code that you'll see--
the LED display in the right-hand side--
is actually positioned between the two sprockets
on the 16-millimeter frame.
And the time code is UTC time code.
It's in IRIG B format.
And you'll see that it's 21 hours,
being UTC (the 5:02 p.m. local time), two minutes, 11 seconds.
And the three digits that are moving
in the upper right-hand corner would be representing a
thousandth of a second.
The solid number 1, the second digit from the top,
is indicating the synchronization of the cameras
as more of a technical parameter.
And that is on every camera to synchronize the field of view,
to synchronize the time.
This is pretty cool.
You can see some of the oxygen.
That cloud of vapor there was from the oxygen fuel umbilical.
Of course, the solid rocket boosters have now ignited;
and the whole vehicle is lifting off the pad.
And you can see sort of the glory of this moment.
I mean, there's an enormous amount of fuel being burned.
One little thing that I love is, if you look at the sky
in the background, this is a very clear day.
These pictures were selected or these movies were selected
because of the wonderful photography
that we got on this day.
And you can see the sky deepen to this dark blue,
and that's because, as Kevin will talk later on,
that we got into color correction that we do postlaunch
to make sure that we're capturing all of these--
the events that are going on, all of the flow events.
So here the vehicle is clearing the pad, and we're on our way.
This view that you're seeing here is camera E8 or Echo 8,
and it's a 16-millimeter camera with a 10-millimeter lens.
Yeah. You can see the boosters now coming off the pad.
And one of the amazing things that a lot
of folks don't know about, the shuttle is bolted
to the mobile launch platform is it's basically
through four bolts on each solid rocket booster.
And the intent of these camera is to watch that bolt,
which is an explosive nut bolt arrangement.
And the bolt weighs about 100 pounds, I should say.
And these nuts fracture and the bolts slap down into a holder
that you're actually sort of seeing in the foreground here.
And they literally release the vehicle from the pad
and allow it to take off.
So, for obvious reasons, we have a camera on each one
of these explosive hold-down posts and to make sure
that they're operating.
They're a critical aspect to the launch process;
we want to make sure that they're operating good.
So you can see that puff of smoke coming out.
And, actually, if you want to put the remote
on a frame-by-frame, stop action,
you can actually see the flash as it explodes.
Now, Kevin, here's where you guys really did a fantastic job
of capturing the detail and the plume
through this automatic aperture on the cameras.
You want to talk about that a bit?
Sure. Many of the 16-millimeter cameras that are on the MLP
and pad structure have an automatic exposure control.
It's the only real way to keep the exposure,
the high dynamic range exposure, from preignition of the SRBs
through the liftoff out of the frame of view.
So the camera has basically an automatic exposure.
Right. Now, look at this sky on the left thing.
You see how it gets dark?
Actually, on both sides, you can see how it turns that deep blue.
That's the automatic aperture in action right there, right?
Allowing you to see the detail in the pad structure
and also in the flame.
Yeah. I mean, when you see a launch in real life,
you can't see any detail with the naked eye in the plume.
It's just like looking into the sun almost, it's so bright.
We can see some of the water from the launch pad.
There's cooling water that comes out--
we'll talk about that later--
that's splashing onto this quartz protective glass
that the camera's behind.
Of course, they're in these explosion-proof containers,
right, to keep the cameras safe and sound?
Yeah. No cameras were harmed in the making of this movie.
That's right.
The cameras are in an explosion-proof box,
which is nitrogen purged.
And the quartz glass
on the front protects the lens in most cases.
There are some cases where there's damage.
And if that's the case, the lenses will be repolished,
reground, or whatever's necessary to bring them back
into optimal condition.
Yeah. All right.
This next view coming up is Echo 18 or camera 18.
And it's a 10-millimeter lens and looking at the TSM
or the tail service mast carrier disconnect.
Yeah. The umbilicals, there's one on each side of the orbiter:
one for the liquid oxygen fueling and one
for the liquid hydrogen fueling.
Those are primary purposes.
You can see there's a lot of other instrumentation
on these things in feed lines.
But, these cameras, their intention is
to make sure we get good retraction of this.
And there's actually a huge 20,000-pound mass
that pulls these things inside the tail service mast
for the door to slam shut and protect them
from the hostile environment on the outside.
Now, these service masts are
about 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall.
So you don't really get a sense of scale when you're looking
at these in these movies.
But they're as big as an average-size human being.
So they're quite large.
One of the interesting photographic challenges
that we run into in photographing the TSM carrier
disconnect from the inside of the tail service mast is,
once that door closes it's pitch black in there.
So there's a set of-- series of--
tungsten lamps that provide illumination.
And the vibrations, the tremendous amount of vibrations
that are induced during the liftoff,
really rattle those lights.
And keeping them from having those bulbs break is -
has been quite a challenge.
In fact, they are in the process of changing those lights
over to the new LED arrays that provide more stability
and less frequency of having the bulbs go
out before the film runs out.
Yeah, yeah.
They're a lot more robust to that kind of environment.
[ Pause ]
Okay, Matt.
This is Echo 001, and this is one of the four cameras
on the edges of the MLP deck.
This is on the - this camera happens to be
on the southeast corner of the MLP deck.
And it's a 16-millimeter camera, as all the ones on the MLP are,
and 10-millimeter focal length.
It's a wide-angle view.
And the effect of shutter speed is about 1/1200 of a second.
For our viewers, you can see
that we've pulled a little bit away back from the vehicle now.
We're taking a bit of a wider view.
There's the SSMEs just firing off there,
and you can see the plume in the background growing.
In fact, if you look carefully against the plume there,
you can see a couple of cameras.
Why don't you mention what those are, Kevin?
Those are some OTV cameras, operational television cameras
that are used for surveillance of the vehicle.
They're the - and are piped back live
to the launch control complex, signals.
So the SSMEs are firing.
You can actually see the launch tower
on the right-hand side of the screen.
And, again, they go on for about 6 seconds.
Computers are making sure that everything's working.
And at T minus 0, those boosters are going to fire.
And you'll see a big puff of smoke come
out of the flame trench there and it'll get sucked back
down in as the boosters come off the pad.
And these two sort of structures, one standing just
to the left of the left booster and one standing just
to the right of the right booster, are called "rainbirds."
And there's some piping sort of flat against the launch pad,
as well, that sort of connect all these things together.
There go the boosters firing.
And all of this fresh water-- 300,000 gallons to be exact--
comes pouring out of those rainbirds
and onto the launch pad to deaden the acoustic noise
and cool the pad down.
So that's where the water comes from in some
of these camera shots.
And here you can see the AEC, the automatic exposure control
on the cameras taking over as the booster plume comes
into view and allows to see - the AEC allows you
to see the detail both in the plume, as well as in the vehicle
and the structure itself.
And you can also see very good detail on the deck of the MLP.
Now, we talked a little bit about the purpose
of each one of these cameras.
And this one is to look for some structural anomalies
on the vehicles, some thermal insulation failures we might
have on the tiles or the blankets, etc.,
and how the water is getting dispersed on the pad.
And also we're looking at debris.
And, actually, you can see here that we've got quite a bit
of debris in the field.
And debris is a big concern for the shuttle folks,
and we want to keep an eye on it
to make sure we don't have anything that's going
to threaten the vehicle.
Now, Matt, you can see that this is - well,
this is camera Echo 4, E004.
It's on the northeast corner of the MLP deck and very similar
in field of view to the camera we just looked at.
One of the things I like to point out is you can see one
of the camera box enclosures we were talking
about a little bit earlier in the left-hand side
of the frame right in front of the left SRB.
Yeah. In fact, as we mentioned earlier in the piece,
there's about 125 cameras or so-- actually more--
that document any given launch.
And so, for brevity in this piece and to make it watchable,
we had to have a lot of film hit the cutting room floor.
And it was really difficult for me to -- to cut a lot of it out,
because I loved all of the footage.
I'm a fan of each and every camera.
But that little camera there didn't get its -
its day in the shade.
That film of the booster had to - we'll have to have
that for the director's cut in the future.
And just to give you a perspective,
this camera originally captured this scene
at 400 frames a second.
So it's being played back at 24 frames.
So it's about 1/16 of the speed that it was actually captured
at to give us a real time view.
You can see here how absolutely gorgeous the day was.
And as we mentioned earlier,
it was about five o'clock in the afternoon.
So in the film industry they call this "magic hour."
And there's no question about it, that this is one
of the best times of the day to take photographs of the shuttle:
You have these rich colors and just a beautiful blue sky
to sort of highlight all of this.
So I find these pictures second to none in all
of the launch imagery that's been taken.
I should say that these boosters shed about 10,000 pounds
of mass per second once they're lit up.
And that's each, so it's 20,000 pounds combined.
And you can really get the feel of that awesome magnitude
by looking at these images.
There you see a piece of debris in the right sort
of doing a ballet in slow motion there.
That looked like a wiring harness from one
of the hold-down studs, but it's hard to tell.
You know teams go through this-- this is engineering footage--
and the teams go through this
and identify everything they see in it.
Okay. This - this is camera Echo 36.
And this is - this camera's located
on the fixed service structure at the 255 foot level.
We refer to the fixed service structure as the FSS.
And it's a 2,000 camera: it's a 16-millimeter camera
with a 16-millimeter focal length lens.
And the effect of shutter speed is about 1/1200 of a second,
similar to some of the other ones that we've seen.
This is a long clip.
In fact, this is probably the longest clip that I sort
of chose for the production.
There's a lot going on in here, but it looks a little boring
for a while because those engines are on for a long time.
So we're still at 400 frames a second here, right?
Yes. Yeah, okay.
So there you see the main engines igniting.
You can see all of this water pouring into the flame trench.
There - there's a big flash.
The hydrogen and the oxygen lighting up.
I should tell you that coming out of
that external tank inside there are the cryogenic propellants:
liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen.
750 gallons a second of liquid hydrogen is pouring
into that engine cluster and 280 gallons a second
of liquid oxygen.
All of these things being combined instantly,
effectively instantly, to create this fantastic combustion
process, burning 3,000 pounds of propellants to turn it
into water vapor every second.
And it's almost invisible when it comes out of the engines.
So the engines are turning on now, and you can sort
of see them glowing against the water pouring
into the flame trench.
That water's there primarily to deaden the acoustic noise
and to keep things cool.
And you've got a good look at the belly of the orbiter here.
One of the purposes of this camera is to look to see
if we lose any tiles due to the shock of ignition
of the solid rocket boosters.
Now, you're going to see the boosters turn
on in just a couple of minutes.
And you see those red sort
of ribbed surfaces there inside the flame trench.
Those are actually membranes to hold water,
and those'll get burned away and you'll sort of see
that in the film when the boosters fire.
There you see them right there, and there's water
in there that's sort of - they're sort
of getting jarred loose and turning into steam.
And I'm assuming, I don't know for sure, that it prevents sort
of a recirculation of the exhaust at liftoff.
Probably, again, acoustic deadening of noise.
There you see those boosters firing off.
If you look in the upper left-hand corner you see the
umbilical falling backwards there.
And then look at how the space shuttle main engines are
punching through that water in the flame trench.
That's really cool.
Yeah. That is quite a dramatic shot.
And you can see the auto exposure control on the lens
as we've talked about on some of the other views really helping
to be able to see the detail on the SSMEs punching that hole,
as well as looking at the plume from the SRB and seeing the edge
of the belly of the orbiter, too.
You see the SSMEs aim a little bit off kilt there,
and you can see them hitting the upper part
of the mobile launch platform as they rise off.
Amazing that they capture all that detail in the SRB plumes.
It's good stuff.
[ Pause ]
It's a fantastic clip.
Yeah. You know, it really is.
[ Pause ]
This is camera Echo 41.
This is on the fixed service structure on the FSS
at the 255-foot level.
It's a 10-millimeter focal length
on the 16-millimeter camera.
It's a real interesting view.
Matt, you want to provide some more details
about what we're seeing?
Yeah. You can see the boosters have already fired.
And this big umbilical structure
that you see swinging back is actually very massive.
The plate on the end of that is about a foot
and a half by three foot square.
You'll see a close-up of that in a little bit.
That's the ground umbilical to hook up to the venting
for the hydrogen tank, and it's got some nitrogen
and helium purged lines and some instrumentation that go with it.
A pretty complicated structure.
You'll get a picture of that in a minute.
If you look at the MLP or the mobile launch platform,
you'll see all the water coming
out of the rainbirds under the launch pad.
Again, our active exposure kicking in there
and giving us a great shot of the plumes
as the vehicle clears the tower.
Look on the right you can just see a tad
of the SSME burning there, that little blue cone.
Fantastic detail there, isn't it?
Yeah. It's a great shot.
[ Pause ]
Echo 40 is one of my favorite shots, Matt.
And this is on the fixed service structure, on the FSS,
at the 275-foot level, just a bit higher
than the two previous views we saw.
And this is really an incredible view of not only the orbiter
but the beautiful ocean of late spring day in Florida
and very nice lighting on the tank, as well as you'll see
on the orbiter surfaces.
Yeah. It truly is magic hour on this.
That orange tank, for those that aren't all that familiar
with the shuttle, that's foam.
That's insulating foam on the tank
to keep the cryogenic propellants cold on the inside.
Liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen are pretty chilly when they get
into their liquid state.
You can actually virtually look into the cockpit here.
If you look carefully, you can see the ocean right
through the window just briefly there for a moment.
Kind of fun.
There's Discovery in all its glory.
This - this engineering view is to look at any possible issues
with the tiles or the thermal protection system
on the vehicle.
And look at that.
Absolutely gorgeous.
You can see some of the flakes of ice sort
of tracking the vehicle as it moves upwards.
[ Pause ]
Remember, as we mentioned earlier, that 3,000 pounds
of water vapor a second is coming
out of the space shuttle main engines on the back.
It's pretty incredible, and it's virtually invisible.
[ Pause ]
All right.
This view is of a structure we call the "gup,"
which is the ground umbilical carrier plate, which attaches
to the ground umbilical carrier assembly.
It's sometimes called the "guca."
That plate is about a foot and a half by three foot.
It's a sizeable plate.
You don't really capture the scale in this.
And you can see the vehicle is now lifted
up and it's taking off.
That umbilical peels back right
at solid rocket booster separation, or detonation.
And, Matt, this is camera 33.
And this is at - on the FSS-- it's at the 235-foot level
and is using a fairly long focal length lens.
It's-- and you can tell by the field of view
that it is a long focal length lens-- and it's 75 millimeters.
Now, if you look, you can see the boosters kind of surging.
It's not a continuous pass; it sort of pushes
and then slows down a little bit.
And what you're seeing there is the natural frequency
of the booster thrust.
I believe it was on the order
of about 7 hertz, 7 cycles a second.
And you can see that go by and hear the [inaudible]
of the boosters going by with a really nice,
tight shot of the exhaust.
[ Pause ]
This camera view is on the pad perimeter.
It's located at camera site 4.
It's about 1273 feet away from the vehicle.
And it's the first in a series of the 35-millimeter cameras
which will be seeing the upcoming sequences.
There's a lens on here.
The focal length is 500 millimeters or so.
And the effective exposure is 1/450 of a second.
And the camera's running at 180 frames per second.
Yeah. It's a beautiful shot.
And this is going to be, as Kevin said,
first in the 35-millimeter shots.
They're a little better quality
because they've just got more surface area to put an image on.
You can see the SSMEs firing and all in nominal operation here.
And as soon as they pull away from the pad,
you'll see the left booster in the background centered
between the two service tail masts.
And just a gorgeous shot right there looking
at the steam coming off the SSMEs.
And this is a fantastic capture of what remains behind
after the vehicle clears the towers.
You have all of this water and steam being pushed
around in this amazing hostile acoustic environment.
I mean, look at what's going on there.
This is all acoustic noise and shock coming
from the boosters and the SSMEs.
Camera 63 is located on the pad perimeter,
one of the camera sites.
It's 1270 feet from the vehicle,
and it's using 105 millimeter lens.
The camera is running at 180 frames a second,
and that's pushing about 630 feet of film
through the camera per minute.
Quite a fast rate, especially for 35-millimeter.
Yeah. You can see the sparkers going there just getting ready
to turn the main engines on.
And, in the background you see the water tower.
That's where all that fresh water comes
from to flood the pad to keep it chilled and deaden a lot
of that acoustic noise
that we've already seen what it looks like in the plume.
Absolutely gorgeous day, really accentuated by this shot.
Blue sky in the background goes great
with the white exhaust plume coming out there.
And you can see a lot of splashing and stuff jetting
out from all different directions at the bottom.
You'll see more of that in the shots that are coming up.
This shot is going to be the first of a bunch
of different views as we march counterclockwise around the pad
to look at it from different angles.
And there you can see the boosters have fired,
and you see it all coming
out the other side of the flame trench.
And - beautiful shot of it coming off the pad.
And the lighting at 5:00 in the afternoon
on this late spring day is just about perfect
from this camera view.
Of course, it won't be perfect from all the views
but certainly is a nice angle
and really illuminates the vehicle as well
as the structure very nicely.
Yeah. Yeah, I like when the vehicle leaves.
I left a lot of these shots run long
because I thought it was kind of neat
to see what happens afterwards.
You can just see the whole service structure here being
engulfed in steam and exhaust from the solid rocket motors.
Now, one interesting thing
about this particular 35-millimeter format is -
earlier we mentioned about the time code.
The IRIG time code is burned in with an LED display.
And on the 35-millimeter format, it's actually in part
of the image area because the 35-millimeter format has four
sprockets per frame.
So there's no way to position the LED time code
in between the sprockets like we can on the 16-millimeter views.
Right, right.
So if you looked at the 16 millimeter,
you could actually see the sprockets at the top
and the bottom of each frame.
And those aren't visible in the 35 as you see here.
The camera number is on the lower right-hand,
on the lower right-hand display of the LED time code.
And it's - in this case, it's camera number 62.
So the 35-millimeter format also allows us
to put a camera designator number that's fairly often used
just to help for viewing purposes
and then tracking purposes.
This, again, is a 105-millimeter lens and is
on the pad perimeter approximately 1,270 feet
from the vehicle.
Look at - look at the - the absolute force that all
of this stuff is coming out of there.
I've talked earlier in the piece about how much is coming
out of this solid rocket booster.
It's 20,000 pounds combined,
and then the SSMEs are losing 3,000 pounds
of liquid propellants a second.
And that really shows up here
when you're looking underneath the launch platform.
You can see that all of that stuff doesn't have anywhere
to go, which is why it's vectored out on both sides
so it can be sort of safely directed away from the vehicle
so there's no rebounding or sort of backflow, so to speak.
And one thing we haven't had a chance to talk
about earlier is the -- how the cameras are triggered.
Currently, the cameras all triggered using the POCS,
or the photo optical control system,
which triggers all the cameras on the pad perimeter
on the fixed service structure, as well as the MLP.
And it's quite a sophisticated system to synchronize
and trigger all the cameras based on the launch clock.
Yeah. It's undoubtedly a very complex system
to have all these cameras operate flawlessly
for each launch.
They're very important if not critical for shuttle launches,
and it's an amazing achievement that all the men and women
who work on this are able to do it with such a degree
of reliability every launch.
Another shot here is, as I said, moving around counterclockwise,
you see the SSMEs or the boosters are just firing -
excuse me - and there you see the "gup" falling back,
as we talked about earlier, the umbilical assembly.
[ Pause ]
This view is using the same 105-millimeter focal length lens
that the other two views we just looked at.
And, again, it's about 1200 feet from the vehicles
where the camera site is located.
You know, this was a really unusual day.
Because you just mentioned earlier that, you know, from -
not from all views is the lighting going to be as good.
But this is about as good as it gets.
I mean, each and every one
of these camera views is well exposed,
both from an engineering and a beauty standpoint.
They're all very, very nice shots.
And it's why we selected 124
to be the predominant content in this movie.
There's the water tower, by the way, in the foreground.
It's just about to get engulfed with the exhaust.
[ Pause ]
This is Dog 68.
It's a 35-millimeter camera, and it's really intended
to be a documentary camera.
So it's running at 28 frames per second,
not really a high speed camera so it's-- but almost real time,
a real time camera view.
It's just a really beautiful shot.
And because it's a documentary camera, we were able
to enlarge the aperture so that the timing block isn't taking
up image area and present it in its widescreen view.
And I think it's quite dramatic.
Yeah. From a beauty standpoint, this is probably at the top
of my list for favorites.
It's just gorgeous quality, fantastic color saturation,
and very unusual for shuttle photography to be
so beautiful at the same time.
[ Pause ]
So Echo 55 begins our series of tracking cameras.
Echo 55 is mounted on a Kineto tracking mount, or KTM,
which we commonly refer to it as.
And it's located at CS1, about 1,200 feet from the vehicle.
This is a nice shot, because you can see there's a bit
of a distortion cloud here that we're shooting through.
And what that is, is hydrogen being burned off
from the fueling system.
They burn off any excess hydrogen to safely combust it.
And so that's what we're seeing here.
And it's really gorgeous as the vehicle sort of 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
which protect some of the order maneuvering system engines.
We'll talk about those later.
But, Kevin, these are all manually operated, right?
I mean, there are human beings behind the scenes doing this
tracking now.
Yes. This KTM or the Kineto tracking mount has
about four cameras that are mounted on it.
And this particular camera, Echo 55, is one of a pair of cameras
and is intended to look at the top half of the vehicle,
while the other camera is intended to look
at the bottom portion of the vehicle.
Right. And we'll see that in the next shot.
We'll have one of the - one of the views from the bottom
of the stack on the next one.
In fact, our intent is to have in the deleted scenes
on this disc a set of camera pair views sort
of pieced together so you can see them simultaneously.
So look for that in the extra features.
This is fantastic-- now they're completely done
with the roll program and sort of on their way.
Yeah. The intent of that camera shot is only
for the first 1,200 feet
of the ascent is really the intention of that view.
And that takes about 18 to 20 seconds, I believe.
Okay. Now, this is camera 52.
And this, of course, is at the bottom of the stack now.
So it's a little different view but part of a camera pair again.
Right. This camera is, as you said, is 52.
And this is located on camera site 2 and is
about the same distance, 1,200 feet,
1,270 feet from the vehicle.
Nice shot of the SSMEs there.
It always amazes me how transparent the exhaust coming
out of the SSMEs is.
Now, this Kineto tracking mount is controlled by an operator,
manually controlled by an operator, who's sitting
in the LCC on the second floor,
two floors below the firing room.
And the person, he or she,
is using a trackball to track the vehicle.
And it's pretty tricky, because they're just looking
at a little video monitor.
And the vehicle is moving much faster
in real time than we're seeing.
We're seeing it at, you know, one-fifth the speed
in this particular case of what it is in real time.
This Kineto tracking mount also has a HDTV cameras
that are mounted that are used for what we'll call
"quick look"-- what's called "quick look"--
to look at these views in real time and then in near real time
when they start the image analysis.
This is done while the film is getting processed
and transferred.
That was a fantastic shot seeing the sun go right
in between the two plumes.
And, in fact, it gives you an idea
of how bright these plumes are to the naked eye.
Because the sun, as it passed through there,
wasn't much brighter than the plumes that you saw.
Wonderful shot showing the column of fire
that the vehicle rises on, and it really contrasts nicely
with the blue,
again highlighting why STS-124 was really the correct mission
to sort of springboard off of to show all the beautiful film.
[ Pause ]
This is camera 57.
This is at CS6, again 1200 feet from the pad or so.
And we're looking at the bottom half of the vehicle.
As I mentioned earlier, the camera is mounted on a tracker.
The KTM tracker has four or five different cameras on there,
and this is the lower half film camera looking
at the bottom of the vehicle.
[ Pause ]
Yeah. You can see the paper covers come off the RCS engines.
Those are Tyvek covers, just the same kind of material
that you put on your house when building it.
And those covers are there in case they get a squall
or a little storm when the shuttle is out on the pad,
not uncommon in Florida.
And we can't afford to have water inside those engines.
So we put those paper covers on there.
And they have these little parafoils that inflate and sort
of tear the cover off.
They're just adhered with an adhesive of some kind.
So you'll see a lot of that white paper coming off during
these launch shots.
Beautiful shot looking up the tail end of the stack.
And possibly on the deleted features or the deleted scenes
on this disc, we're going to try
to edit a piece together showing the camera pair,
the views from the camera pairs pieced together.
And it should look pretty nice.
So look at that on our deleted scenes feature on the disc.
This is Echo 225.
As you can see, it's already in flight.
It's a really interesting view.
It's a medium-range tracking camera.
The mount and the camera are located at UCS4,
which is about 2.4 miles north of the pad.
One of the reasons I selected this shot to be included
on the DVD is because I thought it was really striking
and really beautiful how, in the roll program as they went
into their roll, the sun sort of peeks over like it does here.
And you can see the name pop out,
and slowly the whole orbiter becomes lit
with the evening 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 see some variation in color, and you can see the tiles,
literally make out the boundaries of the tiles there.
So really a wonderful piece of footage
and a remarkable contribution to the DVD
from a photography standpoint.
The lens that's on the camera is a 150-inch sheer lens.
It's a cat-eye dioptric lens.
So it's got a mirror surface.
And it's about 4,000 millimeters focal length
if you converted the inches to millimeters.
Just to give a perspective, Matt, the weight of this lens is
about 250 pounds-- just the lens itself.
It's a huge lens and really unbelievable piece of optics.
You can really see a lot of nice textures
on this shot, too, on the booster.
If you look at the forward part of the booster,
you can see the access panels.
And that big line coming off of the external tank,
that's actually the oxygen feed line on the external tank.
That's where that 280 gallons a second
of liquid oxygen are flowing through to the main engines.
That feed line is about 17 inches in diameter,
so it's a pretty beefy system.
And I think another thing to point out here is
that this camera mount is manually tracked.
So the operator is looking through a bore site
at the camera site, watch vibrations going on all
around him or her, and keeping
that vehicle dead center in the frame.
And it's quite an amazing feat to be able to do
that quite so accurately.
Yeah. They've done a great job of keeping
on target every step of the way.
Now they're getting a little further away, obviously.
And you can see sort of the glow of those engines starting
to come up against the bottom part
of the stack there, as they call it.
And it lets you know that something's going
on at the back end of that vehicle.
So the next series of shots we're going
to see is the views from the HD cameras.
And in this particular view,
this is from STS-114, Return to Flight.
So this was in July 26 of 2005.
And we're about one, about two miles from the pad,
just south of pad 39B here.
And the camera is cocked at a 45-degree angle
to enable maximum use of the 16 by 9 aspect ratio
that is available with the HDTV cameras.
It's important our viewers take a good look
into the left window there.
You can actually see Eileen Collins
who commanded this mission.
You can see her suit inside the window.
Absolutely amazing.
And this is a first, right?
This is a first in the program.
We started using high definition video after Columbia.
And that was one of the first times we saw this level
of detail in photography.
That's - that is correct.
So this particular camera view is EHV225.
This was recorded on STS-117.
It was in June 2006.
And the camera is running at 60 frames a second,
as all the HDTV cameras do.
The orientation of the camera is cocked at 45 degrees
to make maximum use of the aspect ratio of the 16
by 9 frame to get as much of the vehicle,
the space shuttle vehicle, in the frame as possible.
This particular shot I chose because it's well exposed,
and it shows a beautiful sequence in the roll program.
But you also get this really nice vapor phenomenon
as the vehicle accelerates to higher speeds,
and this is not always visible to the - for every launch.
It's a consequence of atmospheric conditions:
dew point, humidity, etc. So I thought it was kind
of a nice touch, this particular image.
[ Pause ]
This is the only long-range camera that made the final cut,
and Kevin will give you the details about that in a moment.
But I want you to look at the bottom of the tank there.
As you saw, it just sort of became engulfed in flames.
And you should know that this is a normal phenomenon
in a shuttle launch.
What's effectively occurring here is the exhaust gases coming
out of the SRBs, and the SSMEs are sort of expanding
into the higher vacuum as they head into space, and they sort
of expand around themselves and fill a vacuum void
which they don't do at sea level and start
to heat some components up.
And that's all accounted for in the design of the shuttle.
But this is an amazing shot, Kevin,
because it's from so far away.
So why don't you explain what we're looking at here.
Yeah, Matt.
The camera here is located at a place called Apollo Beach.
It's within Cape Canaveral National Seashore.
And the camera mount is about 20 miles north of the pad.
So it's quite a distance away.
This is a Bruschere [phonetic] 150-inch lens,
again about 4,000 millimeters.
So quite a distance.
And the trackers, as we've mentioned earlier,
is manually operated.
This is an operator looking through a scope
and using a trackball to keep the vehicle
in the field of view.
Yeah. It's also difficult for the operator
because of the distance to see the vehicle
at launch and to site the pad.
[Inaudible] so he or she grabs it on the fly,
and it's quite a skill level that needs
to be developed in order to do that.
Well - and of course we watched our solid rocket boosters
separate, which is sort of at the tail end of what we can see
with all of the tracking cameras.
And there you see our boosters coming off.
And they separate at about 29 miles in altitude
about 2 minutes into flight.
And they are recovered by divers out in the Atlantic Ocean.
And although they appear to be falling back here,
they're actually traveling another 15 miles or so up,
just tumbling on their own forward momentum before they
peak and then come back down in the Atlantic about 150 miles
out where the diving teams pick them up
and bring them back for refurbishment.
So this sort of brings us to the end of our production.
Hope you guys have enjoyed the commentary.
Kevin and I have enjoyed doing it today for you.
And as the boosters sort of fade out and the external tank
and the orbiter continue on their way to orbit,
we want to dedicate this movie to all of the men and women
over the 30 years of the program or so
that have committed themselves
to capturing all of these fine images.
It's amazing work, takes a lot of commitment,
and it's extraordinarily tough to do so.
And our hats off to them.
So, Kevin, thanks for doing this with me.
Thank you.
It's been a wonderful endeavor.
And hopefully we'll see each other again
on the next space program.
So, signing off.
[ Silence ]