I don't get why exactly this is so impressive. If the exact time of launch is known, isn't it trivial to begin a short, well-rehearsed speech at a specified time so that the delivery syncs with the launch?
It's impressive because it worked. Nobody would know if it hadn't because the shot wouldn't have been used then. Yeah, that makes it kind a trivial but it's still a good shot because it worked.
What makes this one the "best" is that this shot needed to be done right or it couldn't have been done again for years to come (at least if the launch itself was meant to be somewhat meaningful). A myriad of things could have gone wrong but didn't. Of course it's also easy to see they had some tolerances to work with (turning away from the camera to say "that" while standing motionless to make sped up or dropped frames less obvious if they had been necessary).
It's a lot like videos of trick (ball) shots: if you saw them together with all the ones that didn't work, the ones that did wouldn't really stand out much. But when the stars align and everything just "flows" like it should, that gives many people a fuzzy feeling and that's what this TV shot does. It's like a choreographed dance routine.
Do you have a better (or equivalent) example of an independent film crew and talking head hitting the nail on a visually impressive third party event outside their control?
(Without post production fix up magic, of course)
This is an impressive example of exactly that .. but is it the most impressive example, indeed.
Note that the article does not say that it was hard, just that it was perfectly timed. The fact that the time of the launch is known to the second is exactly why they were able to pull this off, but they still had to have the idea, and execute it right.
Plus, realize that we looked at it with the headline "most amazingly timed shot in TV history", which made us look for something extraordinary. It must have been a totally different experience to see this on TV at the time, half asleep learning about rocket fuel, and all of a sudden the guy points in the direction of the launchpad and a rocket lifts off.
I tried saying those words in a fixed time (12 seconds) while looking at a clock now, it still does not seem hard. Appears to be easier once you attach parts of the phrase to time offsets, and probably easier yet with a teleprompter.
