This is the sort of thing which I used to dream of doing, when I was a kid:

When we realized no one had yet launched one in a rocket, we set out to be the first. The rocket of choice was the Estes X Prize Canadian Arrow. It has a very large nose cone to house the camera and takes D size engines standard.

We elected to have the camera point out the side of the cone with a mirror to point the image down past the rocket body. This allowed us to mount the camera vertically in the rocket which means that none of the camera is exposed outside the housing.

Now, where did I put that old R/C parts catalogue?