You may not have noticed, but NASA was also launching an actual rocket at the time. Conducting a livestream and conducting a livestream while launching a rocket to the other side of the moon are hardly equivalent.

Absolute shit show.

You have a remarkably low threshold for "shit show."

Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

For real?

I was rolling my eyes hard at:

    GC systems go?

    GC systems go for all for humanity!

It’s cool. But let’s not act like going around the moon is the most historic thing ever… since we’ve already done it plenty, right?

The feeling it evoked in me was that a multi billion dollar PR program could surely afford to spend a little bit of money on reliable camera tracking, telemetry overlays, visualisations that run at more than 0.1 FPS, etc.

Absolutely bizarre.

Livestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really should be using KSP for it - it's not hard to wire up with external telemetry, and with couple graphics mods, it looks way better than whatever expensive commercial professional grade simulator rendering they're using (which I suspect is part of a package that may be really, really great at simulations - and is intentionally not great at visuals of this kind, as it doesn't show anything that isn't directly representing some measurement).

Go look what the livestream was like for the Mars Curiosity rover, it was fantastic, and that was on a mission taking place 8 minutes away. Their simulation was mostly Demo data for some parts of the mission, but included such things as what part of the control program it was in! It was even a good rendering. I screenshotted it for a desktop background.

But the camera quality is so low and I don't get it.

It seems like the entire industry has just ignored the lessons of old: "Get someone who does this for a living". They should have connections and partnerships with movie companies who actually know how to run cameras. That shouldn't be expensive nowadays, as that knowledge seems to be cheap enough for Youtube creators.

So actually, yes, it could have affected it. Did it really? We will never know.

Also NASA has less experience in this than SpaceX, hopefully it will be better next time!

I've watched hours of athlete parents try to track their athlete kid and it's marginally useful at best. Lots of shaky cam even at Pop Warner football speeds. So panning at the right time, with the muscle control to keep the object centered, is harder than you think.

If they have a professional videographer on staff working that camera it almost certainly would have never happened. Elon, who was in charge of DOGE, didn't take communications and marketing seriously so I'm almost certain they were one of the first to be let go.

Tilting is up and down.

Panning is left to right.

You can't pan up, unless you've fallen over.

More thorough prep/training for camera operators, so they can pan the camera according to a plan, instead of by reaction.

Maybe this camera operator wasn't supposed to pan because it was trying to capture diagnostic imagery that wasn't really intended for viewers, but because of budget cuts, they opted to use diagnostic views as presentation views.

Maybe there was supposed to be a cut to a different camera. But the production room was not sufficiently staffed to coordinate the switch.

Maybe there was no broadcast plan at all and it wasn't clearly coordinated who should be taking what shots.

Maybe they were underpaying the operators and they were not qualified.

Maybe they were underpaying the operators and a single operator was stuck operating multiple cameras and was framing a different camera at the time.

Automated tracking systems.

Sure, it's very likely that this might have happened anyway, but there are a lot of ways that reducing budget reduces planning and coordination. Especially if there is enough budget squeeze to move funds from public support campaigns (this entire stream was a public support campaign) to critical things (like building a rocket).