tags: Shuttle Launch Preparation Choreographed Like Ballet, Space Shuttle, space exploration, space flight, NASA, Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman, Philip Scott Andrews, photography, time-lapse video, streaming video
This video is simply stunning and the photography is masterful. In this video, we are looking at time-lapse photographs by photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews, who decided to demonstrate the process of launching a shuttle in a new and innovative way. Using time-lapse photography, they turned the 6 week process of prepping a shuttle into this gorgeous four minute video called "Go for Launch!"
These visuals demonstrate the fine art of sequencing, providing the viewer with a genuine feeling for the flow and movement of the process through interesting angles and brilliant lens choices. A lot can be learned from this piece.
Congratulations to the photographers and to NASA for giving all of us this kind of visual access to this fascinating process and a wonderful photography lesson as well.
Beautiful video capturing just some of the intricate and complex coordination required to get one of these things out of our gravity well. And indeed we can learn a lot from it, though what would be best to learn is that all this coordination and intricacy is why it costs about a billion dollars a shot to get the equivalent of a school bus filled with, well anything really, into orbit where it will do some good. It need not be like that but as long as we insist sending all this stuff up along with the supremely delicate cargo called living humans and expect them to survive the experience then everything has to be launched with that limitation. It makes sense that humans cost $20K per pound. We're soft, squishy and worth it, but stuff that is bulky and durable, like propellant, shielding, water,food, and construction components which can easily stand hundreds if not thousands of times higher gee-forces, then they too must cost $20K per pound since it travels in the same launch system, currently, and at the rate things are going, we'll be broke before we try something that makes more economic and engineering sense.
If we want to go to space we need a taxi for humans and a cheap, re-usable/multi-purpose and economical launch system for the heavy duty stuff, at which point we can actually afford to have a South Pole Amundsen Scott Antarctica-style research station up beyond low earth orbit, with simulated gravity and lots of shielding for long term research and exploration, instead of the 100 billion dollar accumulation of delicate modules in Low Earth Orbit that might not even be worth salvaging after 2016 and which we'll have to splash into the ocean because of the expense of getting propellant up there.
I love the idea of space R&D, but am frustrated at our blindingly bedazzling fascination with this incredible but bankruptcy inducing NASA space program which has confused intricacy with innovation, and aplomb with aptitude. Cheerio.