Stunning ISS Fly Through Video

1. The video is pretty neat, though not too different from others I’ve been seeing the last 5 years. A VR capable Occulus system these days starts around $750 from what I can tell. I wonder what proportion of people have such systems? I have several computers but all in the $200 range. I wish I would have the VR Oculus system for simulations. But it is hard to justify.

2. Very nice video. Of all the ISS videos out there my favorite is the National Geographic 2 hour special”Live from Space” hosted by Soledad O’Brien. So many insightful live interviews with astronauts on the ground and of course, the ISS.

   It was so good and well produced I bought a copy. Here’s a link to NatGeo’s website with a lot of great clips: http://tinyurl.com/zs4n585

3. I guess I will be the buzzkill here. I am not impressed. The camera/image quality-sure it is great. Cameras and megapixel resolution and color rendition are improving all the time. They probably got the latest Gopro. So what. My guess is their camera department gets all the latest cameras to try out.

   But the video is pretty amateurish. They seem to crisscross back and forth, looking at the same parts of module a couple times. Why didn’t they do it in a more orderly fashion? They showed the robotics workstation on one side of the Lab. Ten minutes later they are in the same place and looking at computers on the other side of the Lab. And, why don’t they run the arm from the cupola? What were the computers on the opposite side of the Lab; were they used for something different?

   The coming and going of the red ISS map image and the tickertape of the few descriptions of things on board-are pretty amateurish, I’m not sure why they needed to show the entire ISS in the red map; the modules are confined to a pretty narrow central area, all the rest is truss and solar arrays; the map sometimes blocks the view of some of the subject, and the 45 deg angle makes it difficult to follow; and the ticker is hard to read. And the coming and going make it difficult to focus on at the right time to see what you are looking for. Maybe they could have included some narration on an optional track? The bobbing of the image up, down and around clearly shows it was handheld by a floating astronaut. Other than some good interior views of things we’ve seen hundreds of times over the last 15 years, there is not much new; no new stories. No real observations. Too bad they did not let us in on some of the inside details. Not even any humans.

   Now if they could do this level of detail in stereo and make it interactive that would be new, different and worthwhile. If they could show us some of the details we don’t often see, that would be good. Perhaps they ought to go with shorter videos dealing with just a particular area or module. 20 minutes all at once is too much. Actually 10 minutes is too much. I wonder if this is something an astronaut threw together while they were in orbit? Surely they must have some professional videographers and video editors at work for the money we are spending? And why isn’t it in stereo and interactive so that you can fly through the interior and stop anyplace and look around, and get a labeled overlay that tells what we’re looking at?

4. I truly had no clue how oppressively claustrophobic it is, ill-suited to any sort of human habitation beyond air and water.

   Inflammatory? Maybe. Liken it to the gridded subdivisions of old down here on earth, all ‘designed’ by civil engineers and thought, until modern planning appeared, to be the model of density and efficiency.

   Likewise the ISS. What a mess.

   Here’s the old fashioned way:
   https://uploads.disquscdn.c…

   And the new way – same yield, more open space, more preservation, better feel:

   https://uploads.disquscdn.c…

   (First time posting pix so let’s see how this works).

5. Personally I thought it was great.

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