Red in space?

[Homersapien]

Just reading in another thread about filming the moon landing and it got me wondering whether NASA has shown any interest in taking a RedOne into space to shoot some tasty footage, after all it weighs a heck of alot less than most cameras up until now and seems pretty handy in low lights. Maybe a bespoke body could be made to make it even lighter. Seems a shame that we haven't ever really seen much great live cinema footage from space and this seems like an ideal piece of technology to achieve it with? Would be a cool advertisement if you could persuade them lol

[Stuart English]

NASA has some very extensive proceedures to follow before putting any new item onto the Shuttle....

[Clint Johnson]

NASA will either spend $386,000,000 designing a 2k camera themselves or wait for the Red to be obsolete before using it. If a Red One is going into space any time soon it will be with one of the private endeavors like Armadillo Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceDev... or one of the more on longer shot organizations like Canadian Arrow, UP Aerospace, TGV Rockets, The da Vinci Project, Masten Space Systems, XCOR Aerospace, Space Exploration Technologies or Rocketplane Limited.

Private ventures is where the real move into space should come from over the next ten or twenty years.

[AuditoryVisuals]

You don't hear much about any 35mm camera going to the Space Station. But you hear a lot about the IMAX cameras going into space. Maybe NASA will wait for the Red Two (which hopefully will have an optical viewfinder; something those film guys can't let go of.)

[Jason Ramsey]

Didn't NASA buy several HVX's that they are using?

Jason

[Illya Friedman]

We at Dalsa have been manufacturing sensors for space exploration for quite some time. For example, all 9 CCDs on the Mars Rover (including hazard avoidance and a microscopic imager) were made by Dalsa.

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/10498/1158703170.jpg


We also make some other very interesting sensors like the world's first imager to break 100 million pixels (10,560 x 10560). Actually it's 111 megapixels.

[acehole111]

NASA will either spend $386,000,000 designing a 2k camera themselves or wait for the Red to be obsolete before using it.

Im sorry but I have to disagree. Nasa's budget today is less than it ever was relatively speaking and fighting funding cutbacks has become part of their daily struggle. In saying that, they have not speant 386 million developing a camera, as Nasa's official camcorder has been the Canon XL-1 I believe.

[acehole111]

We at Dalsa have been manufacturing sensors for space exploration for quite some time. For example, all 9 CCDs on the Mars Rover (including hazard avoidance and a microscopic imager) were made by Dalsa.

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/10498/1158703170.jpg


We also make some other very interesting sensors like the world's first imager to break 100 million pixels (10,560 x 10560). Actually it's 111 megapixels.
Awesome! I would assume an imager of that size would be used in computer chip manufacture or highend microscopes? Telescopes?

[Clint Johnson]

Im sorry but I have to disagree. Nasa's budget today is less than it ever was relatively speaking and fighting funding cutbacks has become part of their daily struggle. In saying that, they have not speant 386 million developing a camera, as Nasa's official camcorder has been the Canon XL-1 I believe.

I really need to get that exaggeration font installed for just this situation.

As a libertarian I tend to go all bitter and sarcastic when talking state expenditures but I do realize that on smaller things like this they will test (>$10,000) a consumer item for safety (spark, outgassing etc.) and buy it for $6000 rather than spend the grossly exaggerated R&D dollars that I wrote.

It is just larger items like rocket engines, computer control and such where they will take decades and billions to get up and testing... and then change their mind to go charging off in another direction.

[acehole111]

I really need to get that exaggeration font installed for just this situation.

As a libertarian I tend to go all bitter and sarcastic when talking state expenditures but I do realize that on smaller things like this they will test (>$10,000) a consumer item for safety (spark, outgassing etc.) and buy it for $6000 rather than spend the grossly exaggerated R&D dollars that I wrote.

It is just larger items like rocket engines, computer control and such where they will take decades and billions to get up and testing... and then change their mind to go charging off in another direction.

You are absoloutely correct. I believe that the computers that power the space shuttle are still only 386 cpu's at 16mhz or so.. They do not take any chances when it comes to vital equipment.

[Clint Johnson]

They wished they had CPUs as advanced as an i386! As far as I know they are still using IBM AP101 chips that were designed some time in the late 1960s... and they would be running in the KHz not MHz. Yes, the chips running the Space Shuttle were designed about forty years ago... how long is that in computer years?

[Weston]

damn what kind of shitty space program do we have. Shouldnt that thing be running on better than what we can get? wth.

[Anders Holck]

Actually the laptops onboard the Space Shuttles and ISS are pretty current.
Thinkpads seems to be preferred, but of cause modified slightly: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=213
The current models are based on the ThinkPad A31P, hope they don't have any Sony Li-Ion's up there...

[CVB]

I really need to get that exaggeration font installed for just this situation.

As a libertarian I tend to go all bitter and sarcastic when talking state expenditures but I do realize that on smaller things like this they will test (>$10,000) a consumer item for safety (spark, outgassing etc.) and buy it for $6000 rather than spend the grossly exaggerated R&D dollars that I wrote.

It is just larger items like rocket engines, computer control and such where they will take decades and billions to get up and testing... and then change their mind to go charging off in another direction.

When I worked at Lockheed we made a hinge for a solar panel that cost upwards of $30K. I cringe at the thought of what they'd spend for a camera.

[acehole111]

damn what kind of shitty space program do we have. Shouldnt that thing be running on better than what we can get? wth.

Well, when your 400km up in space you want to get the job done with the least possible fuss. The faster a computer chip goes the more unpredictable they get as far is errors happening.

But youd be surprised what they can get out of such small processing power. Efficiency is the key.

But they do have modern technology for all the secondary non mission critical applications such as research etc. But as far as the dangerous stuff goes (navigation etc), I guess they feel better off sticking with the old and tested.

[Clint Johnson]

When the AP101 first went into use it had a mean time between failure of only 5000 hours... that is why they have four parallel systems that check against each other and in the case of a two on two disagreement there is a fifth system that is brought online as a tie breaker.

NASA’s first concern is to keep anyone from getting hurt. It doesn’t always work that way but that it their first concern. I’m not saying that private companies won’t give a damn about their astronauts but that the astronauts themselves will realize the risk and demand to push the envelope. I’d be willing to embark on an asteroid resource retrieval mission that NASA wouldn’t let go from CAD to CAM.

And I would take my Red camera with me too... but at $5,000 to $10,000 per pound I’d probably be leaving some of the accessories behind.

The closest I’ll probably get to that any time soon is the pilot for a television drama that I am writing right now. It is set on a private space craft that is on a mission to retrieve an Earth crossing nickel iron asteroid into cislunar orbit. Six people in a space craft that we could start engineering today on a mission that any of a hundred people could put in motion right now with the stroke of a pen.

I’m creating it with the reasoning that a very low budget television series should be designed so that even if it was executed with no real budget constraints it would still cost well under a million dollars per episode. Six actors on a five room sound stage... but they are embarking on the most exciting and dangerous mission that is left for humans to undertake. Catastrophe, triumph, fear and heroics... and no matter what personal conflicts will come up, none of them can just walk away.

And it really helps that space ships and asteroids are amongst the easiest things to create in computer graphics so we’d be able to get outside the ship a few time per episode to keep it from getting more claustrophobic than we want it to be.

Putting good money towards the scripts and the actors - I think it could come in for well under $500,000 Canadian per episode and still be something that I would be proud of and love to watch. For those who haven’t seen the budget for a television series, that is almost ridiculously low and might be a tough sell just because of that. Well that and the fact I only have one rough pilot to my credit and that one was self financed.

So now I just have to find backers for that $500,000 per episode and maybe we’ll be seeing the first Red One shot television series as early as next fall?

See, I managed to bring the topic back around to the Red camera.

[Akube]

Actually the first to get it into space would be stan, kyle.. and the rest of his gang at southpark... they'd just give the mexican dude a 100 bucks and throw in a red into the shuttle along with a whale...

that makes more sense.

....
im sure the nasa guys would go like... oo theres no gravity in shpaysh how kan de kamera take peekchaar.. noo good. maybe de kamera fly awaay..

just like they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on creating this pen that could write in outer space cuz they thought pencils wont write.. nasa was totally smacked silly when they found out that russians used pencils to write in outer space. lol.

[Clint Johnson]

The Fisher Space Pen cost a lot less than that and Fisher covered most of the R&D as far as I know. The reason NASA went with the pressurized ink was that graphite is a rather good conductor and they didn’t want any loose bits shorting out electronics... the Soviet Union had a more lackadaisical attitude towards cosmonaut survival.

[Akube]

cool.. good to know.