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Comment by cududa | Hacker News Reader

Can you please explain how exactly you would heat shield a camera?

Like, your suggestion is a box attached to the ship that changes its aerodynamic profile, with an actuator that can be a point of failure/ fly off and hit other critical instruments?

They have lots of cameras. Were we watching the same video? The thing got absolutely melted and you’re complaining that you didn’t get a front row seat?

5 short years ago we would get a few frames from the camera on the barge where Falcon 9 landed and that seemed incredible.

Just because they’ve accomplished something hard (mostly reliable cameras), doesn’t mean it’s suddenly easy and saying “why didn’t you just put more cameras on it?” comes off as mind bendingly pedantic

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No, I didn't complain about the front row seat :) calm down. And yes, SpaceX is the trend setter in the industry right now, there is no question that their approaches are more modern.

Having said that, cameras today can be really small. Not a big box. Lenses or their protectors can be rather, well, protective (I'm thinking about moissanite here, but may be better solutions are possible). And I didn't see lots of cameras when Starship was going through atmosphere back - how many did you see? Yes, flap melted - but if, say, the ship had cameras all over (figuratively), you could switch to the one which works at the moment.

All of that and more should be, and I'm sure is, rather obvious to SpaceX guys, just like some reasons why some of this can't or shouldn't be done - they are the professionals here most intricately familiar with the hardware and the landing conditions. We'll see how they choose to move forward soon.

Sapphire optical windows are cheaper than you think, but in this case the problem seemed to be that the lens was splashed by molten metal that then solidified.

This could be solved by replacing the protection (I think solutions like that are rather common, mechanically move the flat transparent screen) or by just switching to another camera.

Are you actually familiar with how reentry causes deposition from a melting fin onto the lens of a camera.

I'm genuinely shocked by how you are wording your comments, but that may just be your writing style. Anything of the form of "could be solved..." it kind of ridiculous because the circumstances just happened for the first time yesterday. This isn't like the motorsports cameras that spin the lens or transparent protection 360 degrees to wipe off buildup.

> but that may just be your writing style

No, that's more like an unfortunate choice of wording :( . Sorry.

Aha all good my friend. Sorry to jump on that.

You could protect it in the same way they shielded the pad cameras during apollo (such as the E-8 camera https://youtu.be/DKtVpvzUF1Y), with a quartz shield

A quartz shield doesn't help if it gets coated in iron by a hot plasma. I think the only solution would be sveral shields you can jettison.

The glas used would probably be ok if the flaps held up.

Also we'll probably see footage from the other external cameras later like we did with the third launch... at very least, the opposite fin had one, and the interstage camera; plus there are 11 internal cameras...

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