The free-flying camera takes off from Blue Origin’s New Shepard luanch. But many viewers commented on the rotating glass.
Jeff Bezos showed off a new free-flying camera deployed from Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch, which gives a spectacular view of the rocket high above Earth.
The reusable New Shepard mission launched from Blue Origin’s West Texas site on Thursday (September 18) carrying more than 40 scientific payloads on the suborbital flights.
Bezos tweeted out footage taken from the free-flying 360-degree camera. “What a view,” the Amazon founder writes. “From our new free flying camera — deployed on yesterday’s New Shepard mission. (The ‘bubble’ is the seam between two 180 degree lenses.)”
What a view. From our new free flying camera — deployed on yesterday’s New Shepard mission. (The “bubble” is the seam between two 180 degree lenses.) pic.twitter.com/X6nX5vz2YT
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) September 20, 2025
The ‘bubble’ that Bezos refers to is a very obvious and distracting spinning gas that some viewers found to be irritating. “That is really annoying to watch. Please do better,” writes one X user. Another person tagged Insta360 and said, “Please give Jeff a camera so he can stitch his panoramas correctly.”
The effect is a little confusing. But as Bezos mentions, it is the seam. 360-degree cameras consist of two 180-degree lenses on either side which work simultaneously to capture the 360-degree picture, but it means that there is a stitch line where the two lenses meet. While that usually shows up as a line of distortion when filming on Earth, in space the camera is spinning around so fast that the footage has to be rotated to keep the rocket in the center of the frame, also known as image stabilization.
Without this post-production work on the footage, the picture would just be spinning around wildly with the viewer barely being able to catch a glimpse of the rocket.
It’s not clear either what happened to the free-flying camera after the shot was filmed. PetaPixel has written to Blue Origin to find out and will update this page accordingly.
The video did win praise from his space rival Elon Musk, who wrote “epic view” beneath Bezos’s post.