Behold, the very bizarre Facebook auto-captions from NASA launch

Image: NASA via Getty Images

“And we have lift off the guitarist G 11 mission.” Huh? 

The closed captions on Facebook might need a bit of tweaking after a NASA video displayed some peculiar subtitles.

The video in question is the Wednesday launch of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, carrying a Cygnus cargo freighter destined for the International Space Station, done in conjunction with NASA. As Ars Technica pointed out, the captions leave a lot to be desired. 

Watch the original video below with the captions turned on. 

In case you missed it, here are a few of the more choice errors made in the captions. 

In this case, the caption should have read, “and we have lift off of the Antares NG-11 mission.”

Close but still not quite right; the correct caption would be “core pressurization looks good.”

While this one may make some sense if you’re watching with just captions, it’s still not the correct caption, which should have read, “TVC is nominal.”

Yeah, these are kind of silly. But it’s also kind of a big deal that Facebook can’t get these captions correct. After all, Facebook previously made a big to-do about using these live video captions for hearing impaired users. It can’t always be perfect, but it should be a bit better than this. 

We reached out to Facebook to see what causes these kinds of errors and what might be done to fix them. In the meantime, just use a bit of caution when watching these Facebook videos and if a caption seems too silly to be accurate, it probably is. 

Hope that guitarist G 11 makes it back from space.