Comment by rpozarickij

5 days ago

Direct livestream link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo

I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff.

She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?

  • > She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?

    To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.

    To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".

    The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.

  • You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision.

    People who want the actual details and numbers will read.

    • I firmly believe you can have both exciting, inspiring, and factually correct communication if you make that a priority.

      The experience of hearing factual things presented with passion and obvious expertise is in itself inspiring. Why settle for less?

      3 replies →

  • i'm sure the whole talk track was piped through an AI for clarity and excitement and the presenters were told to read the script.

I feel like they really fumbled the video feeds, it was a mess. Rapid shifting of camera angles as it left the pad, black video, switching to a grainy video of the crowd during booster separation, and a hasty switch back well after they separated.

Come on guys. You're going to the moon. You couldn't plan the launch camera / video feed better? This is how the world sees it, gets excited about it.

  • Quality just looked so poor too it honestly felt 90s quality on some of the feeds, will be criminal if they don’t sort their cameras out before the moon landing