 Welcome aboard Station 204. My name is Jamie Higginbotham and I'll be your guide for your space news from tomorrow for July 31st, 2019. Let's go ahead and get this thing started with some space traffic. Our Earthly Departures begin out of China this week with a really awesome launch. July 25th at 0500 Universal Time we saw private new space company iSpace achieve a successful orbit for the very first time, which is no small feat. This is their Hyperbola 1 launch vehicle, which is a CubeSat class launcher with a capacity of about 300 kilograms to low Earth orbit. As a fun little payload, they also sent up a model car, which I'm not sure how I feel about that. What do you think? Comment below. Regardless, huge congrats to iSpace. Three, two, one, zero, official, let's go. On July 25th at 2201 Universal Time, we had a Falcon 9 taking to the skies out of Space Launch Complex 40. Just over two and a half minutes in flight, we saw the two Falcon stages separate, with the first stage turning around and making its way back for an Earth arrival at landing zone one. Atop the rocket was a SpaceX cargo dragon spaceship, which had flown to the space station twice before. A board was a new docking mechanism, a spacesuit, 40 Mauster knots, and a bunch of delicious crew supplies. The Dragon spacecraft docked a few days later, on July 27th at 1311 Universal Time. This was SpaceX's 73rd flight of the Falcon rocket and 19th successful Dragon mission. Next, on July 26th at 357 Universal Time, a Long March 2 Sea rocket took to the skies. A board with three Yelgen 30 military satellites, and wait, wait a minute, are those grid fins? Well, don't get too excited. China won't be landing the first stage, but rather they're using the grid fins to keep the rocket from landing on populated areas. Actually, on second thought, yes, this is exciting. Since this is a military and classified launch at this point, that's all we really know. On July 30th at 05-56 Universal Time, a Soyuz 2-1A rocket took to the skies, lofting the Meridian Relay Satellite. These are basically military satellites designed to link ground forces, aircrafts, ships, and command centers together. And since it is a military launch, that's about all we know. Other than, this line of satellites is a little bit cursed. Of the eight Meridian birds launched, one failed after only two years, and two more were lost during launch anomalies. Including this new satellite that now leaves just five in their constellation. And while this isn't technically an Earth departure, it is really cool, and you all would hate me if I didn't bring it up. And that thing is the SpaceX Flying Water Tower. On July 27th at 03-45 Universal Time, the SpaceX Star Hopper took its first untethered flight at the SpaceX Launch and Test Facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The 30-meter wide vehicle had a single Raptor engine, which has twice the thrust as a Merlin engine. But even cooler than that is it's a full-flow stage combustion design. And if my research is right, this is the first time a full-flow stage combustion engine has actually taken flight. The whole flight was about 20 meters high, and it did translate the vehicle over just a little bit. It lasted just over 20 seconds. According to Elon, another flight of Star Hopper, this time heading to an altitude of about 200 meters, is slated for a week or two from now. And when that happens, Jared loses a bet with me. Elon also promised an update on Starship in the next two weeks or so. And finally, I have another weird one. It isn't really a launch or departure, but a kind of sorta is sorta? Last month on the Falcon Heavy STP-2 mission, there was a little test spacecraft from the Planetary Society, known as Lightsail 2. The idea is that Lightsail 2 has a huge 32-square-meter Mylar solar sail that uses light pressure from the Sun to propel itself in space. Basically, its fuel is photons. On July 23rd, engineers sent the command to the spacecraft to unfurl its sail, and it did, sending down these absolutely gorgeous shots. In the future, we could see tech like this on CubeSats to help keep them in orbit or do basic station keeping, bringing the value of smaller payloads up even higher. We could even use lasers to help potentially propel these spacecraft to speeds unfathomable today. Lightsail 2 has an on-orbit lifespan of about a year where it will then re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. And now, here's a quick look at this week's upcoming Earth, Moon, and Mars departures. Now, in that Earth Departures graphic, you may have noticed that SpaceX is about to launch again this week, and that launch will happen from the same launch pad that happened last week. And if that happens, this will be the fastest pad turnaround for a U.S. launch provider ever. In the United States, the record is currently held by the Gemini program back in 1965. Gemini 7 and Gemini 6a were launched only 11 days apart. Now, if SpaceX launches as planned on August 3rd, that would put their same pad launch turnaround time at 9 days 49 minutes, beating that 11-day marker. Now, to be fair for the Gemini program, that was actually ready to go in 8 days, but the Titan rocket was being a diva and had a launch abort, causing a three-day delay, pushing the launches then 11 days apart. And we can't forget about the Russians either. They have both SpaceX and the U.S. space program beat by a lot. So, you 6 and 8 were launched from the same pad in 1969 only two days apart. So, SpaceX has a way to go before they'll be able to beat the world record. Nevertheless, it's still very cool. It's forward progress. And speaking of forward progress, let's get a quick update from NASA's space launch system. SLS was originally born in 2011 out of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, all of which came from the ashes of NASA's defunct constellation program, specifically the Ares 5. Follow all that? Great. It was originally supposed to fly in 2017, and prior to that flight, there was supposed to be a test of the core stage called a green run. The green run test would happen at NASA's Stennis Space Center in the B2 test stand. This test stand has an amazing history testing rockets such as the Saturn V, Space Shuttle, and Delta IV. But the nearly 65 meter tall space launch system would be the biggest, baddest, most awesome rocket it had ever seen. The plan was to use the very first actual SLS core stage that was slated to fly. Put it through a full 8 minute test firing on the ground first, and then send it to space after that. This test would mimic most of what they would have to do in flight, including throttling down for the Max-Q, throttling back up, gimbling the engines, maintaining tank pressure, fuel mixture ratios, all of it. The problem is that SLS is woefully behind schedule and over budget, and really, really, really behind schedule. If NASA wants to make the moon by 2024, they're going to need SLS working, and soon. So they were considering cancelling the green run test in favor of doing a much shorter engine firing at launch complex 39B in Florida. This would remove the cost and complexity from the timeline, but adds more risk to the program, since the core stage wouldn't have gone through a full end-to-end extensive test. And now for the news part of this update. NASA has decided that it will indeed keep the green run test at Stennis. It will fire all four reusable space shuttle m- I'm sorry, I mean, expendable RS-25 engines fully pressurized the system, test all of the valves and avionics. They will both test individual components, as well as the system as a fully integrated hole. The entire test sequence at Stennis is expected to last around five months. Hopefully we won't see any delays there. Once tests are complete at Stennis, this core stage is still slated for use on the very first Space Launch System flight, dubbed Artemis-1, currently slated for 2021. Let's change gears a little bit and switch from looking to the future to the past. Last week marked the 20th anniversary of one of my favorite, off-nominal missions. That was STS-93. On this flight we had Eileen Collins in command, making her the first female commander of a space shuttle. On board was the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the heaviest payload ever carried by the space shuttle. Originally scheduled for July 20, 1999, the flight was delayed after a faulty sensor showed a spike in hydrogen pressure, causing the countdown to abort at T-minus seven seconds. Nine, eight, seven. Cutoff is given. Entity is 188, but we have hydrogen in the air at 640 BPM. Now it's July 23rd at 4.30 am universal time, or just 30 minutes after midnight at the Cape. The countdown progresses and... Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three. We have a go for engine start. Zero, we have booster ignition and liftoff of Columbia reaching new height for women in X-ray astronomy. In the roll, we've got a fuel cut, please, number one. Roger roll, Columbia, we're looking at... To the public, everything seemed normal. Maybe that strange fuel pH call, but just over eight and a half minutes later, space shuttle Columbia made it to orbit. But where this story gets a lot more interesting is when you listen to the mission control loops instead. Now before we get into what's going on, let me give you some context. During the space shuttle main engine ignition, a gold pin used a plug and oxidizer post came loose. It then violently ejected itself and struck the cooling tubes inside of the engine itself. Three adjacent tubes were ruptured causing a hydrogen leak downstream of the engine's main combustion chamber. Now in ground testing, it was found that if five adjacent tubes were ruptured, it would create a burn-through causing a cascading failure over the nozzle and a crit one failure, otherwise known as a loss of crew and vehicle. Approximately five seconds after liftoff, an electrical short disabled the center engine's primary digital control unit known as DCU-A and the right engine's backup unit or DCU-B. The DCUs are basically the engine controllers that fly the space shuttle. The left engine was fine, the center engine moved to its backup controller with no remaining redundancy and now limited data to the mission controllers and the right engine was on its primary controller but had no remaining redundancy. Any additional controller issues and that could be the end of the mission. So pre-resolverbleed. Ignition. So I'll wind up. Copy lift off. So I'll left 3104. DCU-A on the left. By booster loss controller density, loss center engine A, right engine B looks like something on AC1. Copy that. AC bus sensors off. Columbia, Houston we'd like AC bus sensors off. We're looking like a transient on AC1. Tell them that transient on AC1. Roger that Columbia, looks like we had a transient on AC1. Loss of DCU-A on the center and DCU-B on the right. Critical AC2 on the center and AC3 on the right. Start along 367. Buddy gets worse. A bit later into flight, the right solid rocket booster started reporting that hydraulic pressures had dropped to critical levels. That is the key system used to help steer the solid motors on ascent and if it fails, you guessed it, another one of those crit one issues. While they didn't know it at the time, fortunately this was a faulty sensor and the solid motors were just fine. Go ahead and piss. Go ahead and piss. Do you have any idea what tripped on AC1? Looks like ratty data. That's just when the yes sir went and pissed. Copy that. So let's recap. Thus far we've got an engine leaking hydrogen plus a loss of engine controllers on the A and B side but on different engines. We've got a problem with the solid rocket motors. I forgot to mention that the AC1 electrical bus has an issue as well but wait, there's even more. It's about to get even worse. It was the right engine that had the pin sear through the tubes and thus leaking hydrogen and that was creating a problem for the combustion itself. That right engine controller sensed the problem with the engine chamber pressure and opted to open the oxidizer valve more to bring the engine combustion back in line with what it expected. This means that now the right engine is burning through more liquid oxygen than it should and the space shuttle only has a limited supply. And that additional use of liquid oxygen resulted in this. MECO, MECO confirm. We've got closed. Disconnects closed. Relay files open. Backup dump files open. 15 foot per second under speed, ohms 1 is not required. Right before the space shuttle was supposed to hit main engine cutoff they ran out of liquid oxygen causing all three engines to shut down prematurely. Fortunately the crew of STS-93 made it to space safely, had a successful on orbit deployment and made it home safely. But I absolutely love the calmness, professionalism and real time troubleshooting of the prop team during the entire ascent. In my opinion it was NASA at its finest and it makes one heck of an exciting ground loop. That space news for this week, thank you so much for watching. Now we don't have a live show lined up quite yet for this next week. We're trying to line up a guest or going to do a round table might have to cancel unsure. The best way to find out is to subscribe on our YouTube channel and hit that bell icon so you get a notification when we're live. 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