I'm not really sure what he means - 'looking straight up'

Looking straight up from where? The cockpit, the ET? And 'refused' suggests someone has directly asked for such a camera and they've intentionally not had one.

It'd be a very boring view. A whisp of cloud, 3 mintues of blue turning to black, and then just more black. The aft-looking camera is there as an engineering exercise to observe any ET foam shedding events....but one also sees the cape vanishing, the exhaust plumes of SRB and SSME, the SRB's seperating, the horizon come into view and then the roll-to-heads-up. A forward looking camera might get some horizon right toward the end of the flight, but to be honest, I'd rather they had it pointing in ANY direction rather than forward. Sideways would be great, so is backwards.

Doug