Space Shuttle Atlantis - STS-79 Launch (Reconstructed Contiguous Edit)
10On this day in 1996, Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on STS-79, a flight to the Mir Space Station. This flight was punctuated by the return to earth of astronaut Shannon Lucid, whose 188-day stay aboard Mir was a U.S. spaceflight record at the time, and was an overall record for a female astronaut.
This video is taken from NASA's official flight day 1 highlights reel from STS-79 and has been heavily upscaled via AI protocol. The launch sequence was slightly compressed, with about 10 seconds having been cut by NASA’s editors between liftoff and SRB jettison. To rectify this, I found another version of this same highlight reel, albeit of a slightly lower visual quality, which showed the launch sequence through SRB separation in its entirety, and spliced roughly 10 seconds from that source. While I cannot unequivocally say that my reconstruction shows proceedings as they actually were to a second-by-second standard of accuracy, the initial flight under SRB power does now fulfil the chronological requirement of being roughly 2 minutes. A discovery that I made in so doing this was that STS-79's SRB burn was slightly short, with booster separation occurring at roughly T+ 2 minutes and 2 seconds, which is a few seconds short of the more common burn duration of 2 minutes and 4 seconds to 2 minutes and 7 seconds.
The audio is a custom composite, using recordings from STS-116, STS-117, STS-133, and STS-134.
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