In response to the video, photojournalist C.S. The post prompted some interesting responses, including museum recommendations, technical explanations recollections of past Space Shuttle launches. While posted to Reddit and other content aggregators stripped of information, redditors were quick to fill in some of the blanks. The close-up video of the shuttle launch comes from one of these three missions. The original NASA video includes footage from shuttle missions STS-114 (the first launch after the destruction of Columbia), 2007's Atlantis mission STS-117 (the 250th orbital human spaceflight, which delivered a solar array to the International Space Station) and mission STS-124, which delivered a Japanese "Experiment Module" to the ISS. Instead these Radial Outward Firing Igniters (more commonly referred to simply as "sparklers") are, according to Melis, "there to make sure any unburned hydrogen gets ignited before it floats around and collects some place where it can ignite later and cause problems." Melis and Burke note several aspects of the launch, including the puffs of cloud-like vapor released from the oxygen fuel umbilical and descriptions of the time codes (cropped from the contextless viral excerpts of the video) used to sync footage across the fleet of cameras.Īlso notable are the flying sparks, which aren't used to ignite the fuel, as is commonly supposed. "You can see all this flow phenomenon going on inside the engines." "Great, great photography going on here," Melis says. The footage captures the six seconds prior to liftoff, as the shuttle's main engines ignite, followed by the solid rocket booster, which detaches after launch and is retrieved and refurbished for subsequent missions. The Columbia Space Shuttle launching from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on June 27, 1982. "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," Melis narrates.
"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," Melis says, introducing footage originally used in technical analyses.Įach shuttle launch is documented by more than 125 cameras, with the viral close-up clip taken from camera view Echo-19, a 16mm engineering camera capturing footage at 400 frames per second for slow-motion analysis of Engines 1 and 3 ignition. The technical commentary is provided by Kevin Burke of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and aerospace engineer Matt Melis, who was part of the Space Shuttle program and the Columbia Accident Investigation team after the shuttle crashed in February 2003, resulting in the deaths of its seven crew members.
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