 Hello everybody and welcome back to tomorrow news. We've got a ton of Starship updates to get through, some Falcon 9 and Dragon news and some Moon news and we've got some launches so stay tuned as this is your episode of tomorrow news for the week of September 23rd 2021. Starting up on board the International Space Station crew two astronaut Tomar Pesquet has taken this photograph of the two Dragon vehicles docked to the US Harmony Module. Now seeing these Dragon capsules docked at the same time is super cool but what's happening down in Texas is arguably a lot more exciting. Some new aero covers have turned up at the production site which are the sheets of metal which cover over the mechanism used to actuate the flaps. Booster 5 stacking has also been getting underway with it looking just around one quart completed on the outside. Raptor work has been happening underneath Booster 4, this engine Raptor Center 67 has been removed and it has been replaced by Raptor Center number 64. MacAzilla is well under construction at this point with the large parts of the chopsticks, the arms that will catch super heavy and the carriage, the part that will slide up and down the integration tower being spotted at the construction facility. A new ship Nosecombe currently expected to be for ship 21 has been seen through the door of one of the production tents. The interesting point with this one being that it follows the old design but it has been manufactured with the mounting point needed to attach heat shield tiles. You can also see here that the Nosecone has been ready for those tiles to be installed. Speaking of heat shield tiles it's pretty much fully checked over on ship 20. I can't spot any markings so even if there are there aren't that many to go as the orbital flight tears the looms on the horizon. Some nice and fresh liquid nitrogen has been delivered to the orbital tank farm, something that the tanks will definitely enjoy drinking up. And finally this week with Starship the news isn't coming from Starbase at all, it's coming from McGregor. Located halfway between Dallas and Orson in Texas it's most famous for being SpaceX's Merlin engine testing facility and also where they test out some first stage boosters from time to time. It was also the location where the company first tested launching and landing a rocket booster with the Grasshopper and Falcon 9R programs. The current process when SpaceX wishes to create a Raptor engine is the creation of the engine in Hawthorne, California. It then being driven to McGregor for testing and then it being driven down to Starbase for integration with whatever vehicle it's designed for. However with the construction of a new facility the first step in that process could be emitted entirely. A new production facility has been announced which will be dedicated to manufacturing the next generation Raptor 2 engines and as you might imagine SpaceX will be needing a lot of them meaning that this rocket engine factory will soon become the fastest in the world. A new Raptor test stand has also been built allowing the engines to be tested vertically instead of just horizontally. The current trend seems to be the R-Vax being tested horizontally and the other variants being tested vertically. And don't worry this doesn't mean anything bad for the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy as their test stands are completely safe and secure as long as the vehicles keep flying which it looks like they will for a very long time as the new contract from the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure of Turkey has just been announced for the launch of Turks at 6A. And to wrap it up this week with SpaceX Dr. Siam Proctor of Inspiration 4 has released this video showcasing the first opening of the docking hatch revealing the cupola and the earth below. It really is magnificent. We've got some moon news for the first time in a while and it's to do with NASA. The organization's Volosiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover or Viper which is a very cool background name has been chosen to land near the western edge of Nobel Crater at the Luna South Pole. The location is one of the 15 originally thought up locations but it was chosen as it has good visibility of the earth for direct communications, good illumination for the solar panels, the terrain doesn't feature that many steep drops which would be difficult for the Rover to navigate around and it quote maximizes science return and flexibility to help ensure mission success once Viper is on the moon. The launch of Viper is scheduled for 2023 but with spaceflight it's very important you have everything ready certainly with those missions to other celestial bodies. Bringing it a bit closer to home there has only been one launch this week but it is an exciting one as it went to a space station and we had an arrival back on earth with humans inside. The three crew members of Shenzhou-12, Nihai-sheng, Liu Bo-ming and Tang Hongbo touched down in the Gobi Desert around 04.30 on September 17th, ending their three-month stay on the Taian Corp module of the Taian Gong-3 space station. With the main parachute deployment occurring at 10 kilometers above the ground and the heat shield falling off at five and a half the capsule touched down within the expected area disclosed in the airspace closure notices issued earlier in the week. A few days later on September 20th at 0710 UTC this landing was followed by the launch of Taian Zou-3 atop this long March 7th, lifting off from LC-201 at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Henan Island, the second ever cargo resupply mission to Taian Gong-3 and the fourth out of 11 launches needed to build the station. This Taian Zou spacecraft is holding cargo for use on the upcoming Shenzhou-13 crewed mission including a new 90 kilogram space suit designed for EVAs. Docking to the core module just under seven hours later at 1408 UTC the same day it now seems pretty much everything is set for the next three Taikonauts to head into space. Coming up over the next few days there's an Atlas V in the 401 configuration, Long March 3BE, Zhilin-102D atop a Kaio-Zai-1A, Yao-Gan-3202 atop a Long March 2C and Zhilin-102F atop another Kaio-Zai-1A. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tamifeskov. Space weather this week continues to keep us very interested. As we take a look at our front side sun look at that big region in the south this is region 2871 and it's been firing off a bunch of solar storms some of them almost earth directed but not quite. On top of that we've been seeing a lot of other filament eruptions in the south and those have been nearly earth directed we might even get one of them graze us here in the next few days but it'll just be pretty minor but that's not even the whole story. We also have region 2872 2873 and then look at all these little regions beginning to pop out we got 28 possibly 74 75 76 oh my goodness we can't even keep up with all the numbers that are of sunspots that have been coming out on the earth-facing disc we have already boosted that solar flux up into the low 80s and it could easily boost up into the mid to high 80s within the next couple days so this is good news for amateur radio operators who need that solar flux to be boosted. Believe it or not though that's not the only story either because we have this massive coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the earth strike zone here in the next couple days it will be sending us some fast solar wind so even though we had a solar storm just this past week we could easily get yet another one here in the next couple days. Now as we take a look at our far-sighted monitor this is stereo a and it's looking at the sun just a little bit from the side you can see region 2871 as it fires off that gorgeous solar storm on the 17th and then early in the 18th you can see even another solar storm lift up in the north now that one is not earth directed neither of these are really but look at all the active regions that just begin to gurgle up to the surface oh my goodness we're going to have a gorgeous show here in the next probably week to two weeks of all of these active regions and you can tell because you can see the band in the north and in the south this means solar cycle 25 has fully taken hold at least on this side of the sun so expect a potential for m-class flares and this could affect space traffic for any types of radio comms here in the next all maybe two weeks so we're going to be paying attention to that very carefully and also we could have more threat for some decent solar storms. For more details on this week's space weather including when and where you can see aurora and how those bright active regions might affect you come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com before this episode ends let's give a thanks to all of our citizens of tomorrow they contribute financially every month and get access to some of our perks including access to scripts and the escape velocity discord channel if you want to join the escape velocity orbital sub orbital or ground support citizens head on over to youtube.com forward slash tlmorrow forward slash join or just click the join button next to the subscribe button below showing the show around also helps us a great deal so if you feel like doing it i'd recommend you do thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week and goodbye