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NASA TV UHD is now broadcasting rocket launches in 4K

Good news everyone; NASA’s launched a new TV channel that’ll let you watch rocket launches in eye-watering 4K Ultra HD at 60fps. 

The bad news? Right now, you’ll only be able to get this channel if you’re in the States and you can pick up signals from the AMC-18 satellite. 

There is a silver lining; NASA says that in the future it hopes to make its NASA TV UHD channel available online, but there’s no indication as to when this might happen. 

Related: Sky Sports 4K confirmed along with Movies and entertainment TV4K video on a phone IS possible over 4GIn the meantime, you can feast your eyes on launch footage of Orbital ATK’s commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, shot on six Harmonic 4K cameras, at 1080p at 60fps on YouTube. 

NASA says that you’ll need at least 13Mbps of spare bandwidth to stream its 4K footage, which is interesting; the likes of Netflix and Amazon advise that you’ll ideally need 20-25Mbps spare, 15Mbps at the very least. 

Harmonic is currently in talks about bringing the channel to pay TV providers in the US which could conceivably pave the way for similar deals with BT as well as Sky, at some point after the launch of Sky Q

NASA’s Goddard Space Centre also been busy snapping over 100 million pictures of the sun in 4096×4096

Put together, and at 30fps, you could in theory watch eight hours of Ultra High Definition video a day for four months. There’s also a 16-second long 4096×4096 30fps video of a coronal mass ejection from 2012 that’s available to download from NASA – although you’ll be hard pressed to find a monitor that’ll let you watch that in its full resolution. 

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