 Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to tomorrow. Coming up, there were some really cool launches that took place over the weekend. Plus, a Japanese probe attempted a rare second chance to get into orbit around the planet Venus. This is your space pod for December 8th, 2015. First off, a rare Soyuz rocket, the Soyuz 2-1V with no iconic liquid strap-on boosters launched on Saturday at 1409 UTC from the Plesex Cosmodrome in northern Russia. The mission hauled the Canopus ST Earth Observation Satellite reportedly on a mission to bolster the Russian military's anti-submarine capabilities, and also the KYUA-1 payload, a reflective spherical satellite built as a target for tests of defense radar systems. Within 24 hours after the launch, however, Russian media started reporting that one of the spacecraft hadn't separated from the upper stage. Apparently, the other spacecraft was fine. On December 7th, officials had declared the Canopus ST satellite a loss. Ground control had attempted to make contact with the spacecraft in order to try to salvage it and get it to decouple from its Volga upper stage, but apparently they discovered that one of the bolts, one of four bolts that was going to separate it from its upper stage, failed to release, so that was why it got stuck to the upper stage and why it's going to re-enter the atmosphere in just a few days. In the meantime, NORAD tracking information indicated on December 6th that the Volga upper stage with the Canopus ST satellite still attached had maneuvered to a 104 by 564 kilometer orbit, thus putting its perigee in a much denser part of the atmosphere and will enable a very quick decay of its orbit and eventually a fiery burn up in the atmosphere. This maneuver was probably programmed into the Volga upper stage before the launch to reduce space junk after the delivery of a satellite, but with all the extra mass of the satellite that's still attached, it wasn't able to immediately have a deorbital burn and re-enter the atmosphere, and that's why the entire stack is going to be circling around the earth for a few days. According to NORAD's estimates, however, that re-entry could take place as soon as today, but we're just going to have to wait and see when that actually takes place, at least at the time of me filming this, it hadn't re-entered the atmosphere just yet. This was the second launch ever for the Soyuz 2-1V. Its first flight was on December of 2013. As I mentioned earlier, it does not have any of this liquid strap-on boosters that are on normal Soyuz flights, but some other changes with this is its first stage engine is actually powered by one of the old NK-33 engines from the Soviet moon program, and this replaces the normal RD-117 motor that flies in that position. Something interesting was on October 5th of 2015, the United Engine Corporation, ODK, announced that it had conducted a successful 40 second test firing of the NK-33 engine to certify it for use on this Soyuz 2-1V rocket. The firing tested an upgraded combustion chamber and a newly manufactured ignition chamber. Both components were apparently modified in the wake of Orbital ATK's Antares failure back in 2014. Speaking of Orbital ATK, an Atlas V rocket successfully launched a Cygnus cargo spacecraft for the mission designated OA-4 on Sunday, December 6th at 2144 Coordinated Universal after three days of delays because of weather. Four minutes into flight, staging occurred, and the hydrogen-fueled Centaur was fired to insert the payload into a 51.6 degree orbit to match that of the space station. The Cygnus spacecraft then separated from the Centaur 21 minutes into flight, entering orbit 230 kilometers above the Earth. The Cygnus spacecraft named the SS-Deak Slayton-2 deployed its solar arrays shortly after entering orbit, and company officials said the spacecraft was in good health as it began its two-and-a-half-day approach to the ISS. The Cygnus carrying more than 3,500 kilograms or 7,383 pounds of supplies, equipment and experiments for the ISS is scheduled to arrive at the station early December 9th. The station's robotic arm will grapple the spacecraft and birth it to the Earth-facing port on the Node 1 or Unity module. The first time that docking port has been used by any cargo spacecraft. Cygnus will remain parked at the station through late January to be loaded with about 1,360 kilograms or about 3,000 pounds of trash, packing materials and other waste. After being unbirthed from the station, the freighter will fly away and re-enter the atmosphere for disposal. Meanwhile, also on Sunday at 2351 Coordinated Universal Time, Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft, also known as the Venus Climate Orbiter, tried for its second and final chance to enter orbit around Venus after missing the planet in 2010 due to a problem with the craft's propulsion system. Its main engine was rendered useless on the first attempt, so Akatsuki relied on its small reaction control thrusters to conduct an orbital insertion maneuver lasting about 20 minutes and 30 seconds, the longest burn ever conducted by the vehicle's small thrusters. During its closest passage of the spacecraft at a distance of about 550 kilometers from Venus, Akatsuki immediately turned to Venus after the maneuver and operated its five cameras to collect at least some data in case the maneuver failed. The burn was successfully completed as seen in telemetry from the spacecraft. Doppler tracking has also shown a change in the spacecraft's velocity. However, it will take up to three days of ranging measurements to confirm whether Akatsuki reached its planned orbit. We may even find out today its exact orbit, but in any case, this is a huge win for JAXA and congratulations to everyone over at JAXA that made this happen. To be able to pretty much recycle and reuse this spacecraft after it failed the first time and still hopefully be able to accomplish this mission is huge, so big congratulations to over at JAXA for this. Thank you very much for watching this video and I really want to know what you guys think about these three particular missions, so leave a comment below or on any of our social media. Also, don't forget to congratulate JAXA, Orbital ATK, United Launch Alliance and even Roscosmos for their partial success. These were all great missions. If you're willing to enable, please consider contributing to our Patreon campaign so that we can continue to make space videos like this. And things have kind of changed with how we're doing our campaign and we have some new goals going into 2016, so please go check it out and if you can please help us out to continue making these videos. Thank you again for watching. My name is Michael Clark and hopefully you know a little bit more today than you did yesterday, thanks to tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.