The Holiday Fireplace Video We Needed

There’s a new contender for your holiday fireplace video. This one comes from NASA, and features rocket engines and boosters to light up your days with Space Launch System holiday cheer.

Say goodbye to the crackling logs in fireplace videos of Christmas past. We’ll miss the anticipation of the fire burning down to embers and the next log being placed in the fireplace.

Instead, we can gaze contentedly as the Space Launch System’s four RS-25 engines and pair of boosters light up our video hearths.

Enjoy the warm glow of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as their combustion casts a calming, flickering glow. Thrill to the intense white-hot gases from the solid boosters as their aluminum powder and ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, bound together by polybutadiene acrylonitrile, is set ablaze.

NASA created this 8-hour-long looping video from the November 2022 launch of Artemis 1 to the Moon. The holiday video is a somewhat sanitized version of the real launch. The real launch was a thunderous, bellowing spectacle featuring a towering maelstrom of light and thorax-vibrating sound. Below is the real launch.

Traditionalists might scoff at this updated holiday fireplace video, and tradition is fine. But progress is also good, so why not spend some time thinking about humanity’s frontiers, and our return to the Moon, while tucking into some turkey and eggnog?

Merry Christmas, and Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends.