[Alberta's Child]

I think you're getting something confused here. Most shuttle launches are videotaped by military aircraft flying at high altitudes to record the orbiter as high as possible. If you go back to 1986 and remember those classic shots of the Challenger coming apart, keep in mind that those clips were shot with large, specialized pieces of equipment. Nobody who videotaped that launch from the ground would have been able to get that kind of magnification, and the Challenger was "only" 48,000 feet up (as opposed to 200,000+) when it was lost.

[r9etb]

I think you're getting something confused here. Most shuttle launches are videotaped by military aircraft flying at high altitudes to record the orbiter as high as possible.... Nobody who videotaped that launch from the ground would have been able to get that kind of magnification, and the Challenger was "only" 48,000 feet up (as opposed to 200,000+) when it was lost.

Actually, those shots were and are from ground-based cameras. Aircraft cameras cannot be as large, and are too prone to turbulence to be a reliable video source.

FWIW, I once saw some video of the Shuttle in orbit, shot from a ground-based camera. From a slant range of hundreds of nautical miles you could see the shapes of the larger equipment in the payload, the windows, and IIRC even the OMS pods. (At the time, the capabilities of that particular camera were classified -- I heard that the guy who hooked the shots into NASA Select TV got canned....)