Starship Flight 7

NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.

Yeah, they have been covering space stuff for decades by now. They have literally dozens of remote cameras by now around Starbase and the Cape, funded by merch sales and community contributions. :)

If you're referring to NSF streams from Starbase (Starship program), all of the cameras are installed on public land. There's no law prohibiting you setting up a Web cam (with autonomous power supply) in the middle of the forest, or on a riverbank, or on a dune 1400 feet from the OLM.

They started doing it when SpaceX was launching their first fuel tanks literally in the middle of nowhere, you can just sit on a side of the road a few hundred feet away and record (or even stream) everything from a basic Webcam. Eventually more and more people liked it and started contributing, then came branded T-Shirts, etc.

Now there's whole cottage industry in Boca with people spending weeks and months there, setting up and streaming from the cameras, they have trailers/control rooms, high quality equipment, daily and weekly updates, 24x7 streams, etc. NSF is a big player, Tim Dodd is another one, there's quite a few smaller players too.

NSF DOES seem to have some sort of agreement with SpaceX on streaming some of SpaceX's livestreams (ie when Ship goes out of visible range and SpaceX is the only place you can get video and of course telemetry). They didn't use to that until shortly after SpaceX streams moved to X (and immediately got replaced on YT by AI generated Elon peddling bitcoins).