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I don’t know what else to say except that this is pretty much the freakin’ coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.
And you know that Lights in the Dark specializes in pretty freakin’ cool things. 😉
At 5:32 PM EST on Thursday, June 18, the Atlas V rocket carrying the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canveral, beginning a new era of lunar exploration for NASA and paving the way for future generations to develop long-term outposts on the moon. The LRO is loaded with various gadgets that will map, scan and study the lunar surface from orbit, and the LCROSS will examine lunar polar craters for evidence (or lack thereof) of water ice by sending a section of the main rocket to impact a crater, and then scanning the resulting debris plume.
This should provide a definitive answer to the possibility of water being present on the moon in the form of ice hidden in permanently shadowed craters. Very important, considering the need for the life-sustaining liquid to future lunar colonies.
But what is really the topic of this post is the video above….a camera, mounted on the upper section of the Atlas V, captured the entire launch from a first-person view looking backwards along the rocket. From the launch pad among the tidal islands of Cape Canaveral, through the clouds and into Earth orbit we are along for the ride, watching the fiery exhaust bring us miles above the Earth until the sections separate completely.
Fan-tastic. Enjoy.
Video: NASA
Lights in the Dark 
Most, if not all shuttle flights have this camera “ride” from several different vantage points. Check those out as well. Pretty cool!
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Only the recent shuttle flights have had this camera, IIRC the first one was on Atlantis in early 2001 (?) and was located at a different location than nowadays. The latest onboard camera imperative and location came after the Columbia accident. Oh, and the solid rocket boosters now have several video cameras as well, but those are not transmitted live, but recorded onboard and recovered with the boosters.
One of the better onboard camera views IMO was during the MER Spirit launch, Mars Odyssey was also pretty cool, both were Delta II launches – you get to see the solid boosters jettisoning.
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Ok, well this is the first launch-cam I’ve seen that transmitted from all the way up into orbit. It’s really cool. Esp in HQ and fullscreen!
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Gordan – do you have links for those other (non-Shuttle) launch videos?
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Gee, I was thinking about it this morning looking at today’s APOD – some of us are SO old, we remember when NASA used Atlas rockets to launch humans.
(but I don’t remember which came first, Mercury-Redstones or Atlas-Mercury)
Still, in various iterations, Atlas still provides a hot ride after almost 50 years.
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Redstones were first and were used for suborbital flights. They didn’t have enough oomph to launch Mercury capsules to orbit as Atlases did.
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I’m afraid not. They were present on youtube some time ago, but were removed probably due to copyright restrictions. I myself have wanted to see complete Mars Polar Lander, Odyssey and Climate Orbiter launch videos, but they are nowhere to be found other than probably NASA’s archives. Two clips on youtube have an abysmal framerate, but show the Polar Lander camera footage was quite spectacular.
FWIW, this is the site of the company that provides most of those rocketcams: http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/
Coincidentally, the video camera on LCROSS that will provide images from the lunar flyby tomorrow and also video of the impact on the moon is provided by the same company.
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“We’re so old we remember when Earth orbit was fifty feet off the ground, and WE LIKED IT!!! Bahhh!!!” 😉
Thanks guys for the info!
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