QUALIFIED SUCCESS: The first shuttle camera made the ride to space today aboard STS-112. Watched it live on one of the NASA feeds.
I’m impressed that the system worked as well as it did, carrying on transmitting just fine all the way to ET jettision and a moment or so after (at least, that’s when our feed stopped). The hazing of the lens was unfortunate, but that’s no big deal as it can be fixed for the next flight. What irks me the most is the ham-handed way NASA handled the camera feed. It was quite irritating that, after all the hype about the camera and the live broadcast and all, NASA kept switching to other cameras. Particularly annoying was the fact that they switched to another camera just a second or two before SRB separation, what should have been the highlight of the flight. And while it was very difficult to make out, they did the same thing at ET jettision, cutting away for a couple of seconds, then coming back as the Orbiter was already separated and moving away. The lens problem was perhaps foreseeable and readily fixable (apparently Nascar handles this sort of camera problem routinely), but the switching around of camera views at critical times was either pure incompetence on the part of the video team or some sort of preemptive ass-covering in case something went wrong with the separations, and either way it’s irritating and a bigger letdown than the hazed lens.
(I still haven’t been able to download the video, thanks to the near-ubiquitous use of java code to spawn popup windows for it. Even disabling my ad filter doesn’t help, this java crap simply does not work with my machine. And yes, I do have an up-to-date browser.)