If you want to find someone qualified to make video footage of a rocket booster in action then you need look no further than NASA. They’ve been doing it a long time and they haven’t been idle. Their new High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) camera has been designed to capture rocket engines at high resolutions and at high speeds using multiple exposures as once.
What you can see above is very detailed footage of Orbital ATK’s QM-2 solid rocket booster being test-fired. The video has been shot using NASA’s HiDyRS-X camera, which allows the video to be detailed without overexposing either the video in general or underexposing the booster’s tail. The three-minute clip conveys the power of a rocket booster accurately for, perhaps, the first time since we started watching massive engines blast incredible amounts of power out their backsides. We should be frightened at how powerful these things are.
Seeing the QM-2 rocket test this clearly, though, we have to ask: What if these test fires are responsible for speeding the planet’s rotation up a few seconds…? Nah, we’d need much larger rockets for that. But if this thing broke free from its mountings… that’s something we don’t really want to imagine.
Source: NASA (YouTube)