 Welcome aboard station 204, my name is Jamie Higginbotham and I'll be your host for your space news from tomorrow for August 7th, 2019. Now before we get started, I did have a quick correction. This is a rather big one, literally, last week I said this. The 30 meter wide vehicle had a single Raptor engine, which has twice the thrust as a Merlin engine. Okay yeah, not 30 meters, I meant 9 meters, which would be 30 feet, forgot to do that conversion. At 30 meters, that would be about the equivalent of three Saturn Vs kind of hooked together, all like Saturn V heavy style, which actually would be kind of cool to see. Yeah, I forgot to do that conversion from Imperialumetric, don't let me send things to Mars. Alright, on a slightly different note, I kind of disagree with an assessment that I got something wrong. Here's what I said. The Dragon spacecraft docked a few days later on July 27th at 1311 universal time. Okay, according to NASA, cargo dragon actually births with the International Space Station, it doesn't dock with the International Space Station. The difference being, birthing is done under the space station's power and docking is done under the spacecraft's power. However, according to the definition of docking for a spacecraft, quote, it is to join with a space station or another spacecraft in space, unquote, which means technically speaking, cargo dragon did dock with the International Space Station. I would argue that using the phraseology dock with the space station is far more inclusive and easier to understand than saying it birthed with the space station, which is really kind of a pretentious way of saying it anyhow. So we're probably going to stick with docking with the space station, unless someone has a really compelling reason in the comments as to why we shouldn't. Okay, on that note, let's go ahead and get started with our launches from this last week. Turning our attention over to Russia, a Soyuz rocket carrying the Progress Cargo spacecraft made its way to the International Space Station. Lifting off on July 31st at 1210 universal time, the Soyuz rocket delivered its Progress spacecraft to orbit just nine minutes later. From there, the Progress MS-12 filled with 2.7 tons of food, water, fuel and supplies performed a fast rendezvous with the International Space Station. Then, they did an automated docking only three hours and 19 minutes after liftoff. This is the fastest approach to the station ever, beating the old record by about two minutes. Progress MS-12 is expected to remain docked to the station until December of this year. On August 6th at 1930 universal time, we got to see an Arian-5 take flight. Carrying the Intel SAT-39 and EDRSC satellites, Arian space had a flawless mission all the way uphill. Intel SAT-39 is a high-powered satellite designed for broadband access in the African and Asian markets and EDRSC is the second satellite in the European data relay system. EDRS enables people to observe Earth almost live and that will accelerate responses to emergency situations. And if we're really lucky, maybe someday we can use a satellite like this to watch launches from space live going to space. And finally this week, we have the elusive, expendable Falcon 9 that was fighting some bad weather but did eventually take flight about 30 minutes into its launch window on August 6th at 2323 universal time. This was the third and final flight of booster 1047 which is why you don't see the somewhat iconic rocket landing legs or grid fins. Shortly after stage separation, we lost that stage 1 feed and followed stage 2 all the way on its ride uphill to orbit where just after 30 minutes from liftoff, the AMO-17 satellite was deployed. But you didn't think SpaceX would launch a rocket and not recover. Something did you? Check out this footage. Oh, it is so freaking cool. Look at this. Here it is. Shortly after launch, Elon tweeted out this drone footage of mist tree capturing half of the fairing. How freaking cool is this? Alright, on that final note, let's go ahead and take a quick peek at the orbital launches originating from Earth, its moon and Mars, upcoming this week. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck took to the stage at the SmallSat conference to talk about something new coming to the Electron rocket, recovery and reusability. Let me explain why I thought this was impossible. So we have a terminology within Rocket Lab that we affectionately call the wall. And the reality is we're not doing a propulsive reentry and obviously you saw we're not doing a propulsive landing. And the fundamental reason for that is that that takes a small launch vehicle and turns it into a medium sized launch vehicle. And we're not in the business of building medium sized launch vehicles. We're in the business of building small launch vehicles for dedicated customers to get on orbit frequently. This is a hard, hard problem. And we're taking a completely different approach to solving this problem. We're doing it very, very passively. We're doing it with a lot of TPS and a lot of aerodynamic decelerators to try and push our way through that boundary wall. So how is Rocket Lab going to recover Electron? Well after stage set you won't be seeing any form of a return to launch site burn or even an entry burn like you would on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Instead, Electron will use aerobraking and thermal protection to slow it down as it reenters the atmosphere. From there a parachute will deploy to help burn off even more speed but more importantly to give a helicopter a target to grab onto. Once the helicopter has the Electron secured they'll bring it back to the recovery ship preventing it from ever hitting water. Now if you're like me and you saw that helicopter recovery animation you probably looked at that and went, yeah, no I don't think it's going to be quite that easy. Well, Peter actually touched on that. And I bet a lot of you guys were sitting there watching and looking at the helicopter piece thinking, oh that's tricky. But as a budding helicopter pilot I can assure you that is the least bit that I'm worried about. That bit is super easy. Getting through the wall is really, really hard. Rocket Lab says that the previous two flights have flown with instrumentation to help them measure and build their reentry models and the upcoming flight sounds like they will be targeting a soft landing out at sea. Then on flight 10 we can expect to see the first public stage one block upgrade to the vehicle. Think of that like getting a new version of Windows or macOS for your computer but it's all with rocket hardware instead. And then from there it sounds like we'll be practicing and practicing and practicing some more until they have their first successful air recovery. Only time will tell whether this will work. But adding more and more rockets to the growing list of reusable vehicles is only a good thing. And speaking of rockets that will use helicopters as part of the recovery plan, let's turn our attention over to United Launch Alliance and the Vulcan rocket. Showing the progress Vulcan is making, CEO Tori Bruno tweeted out this picture of the structural qualification testing article. While you're not looking at flight hardware here, typically the structural test articles happen pretty far down the new rocket timeline. Here's a picture of their absolutely stunning production factory. You also get an idea of scale as you've got the Atlas V sitting on the left with the Vulcan in the middle. Now moving up to the top of the rocket here's something called the PATH which is the payload attach fitting. Basically this sits at the very top of the rocket and is what attaches the payload or satellite dispenser to the rocket itself. Now moving all the way down to the other end of the vehicle, we have the thrust structure. This is at the bottom where the two BE-4 Methilox rocket engines will attach. And it needs to be able to take over a million pounds of thrust. While ULA is only sort of kind of passively looking at recovery, this is basically the section of the rocket they will jettison and then try to recover by helicopter. Not right away, but someday in the future, maybe. Speaking of engines, Blue also tweeted out this image of the BE-4 engine in the test stand running at full power. If everything goes well with these tests, it looks like ULA may be able to actually reach that planned April 2021 initial launch date. And if you'd like more information on Vulcan, we had ULA CEO Tori Bruno on our live show on orbit 10.09. Check that out at the 16 minute mark. Now I'd like to hand it over to Dr. Tamatha Scove for this week's Space Weather Report. Space Weather this week has definitely picked up. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see the last and the set of coronal holes that's rotated in through the Earth Strike Zone. It sent us some fast wind and a solar storm that brought Aurora as far south as Colorado in the USA. So Aurora photographers are very happy. We've cleared up that Aurora drought. We've much needed beautiful skies. Now on top of that, you can also see there was a solar storm that lifted off in high latitudes, and it looks like we're seeing a couple sunspots developing on the Earth-facing disc. And this is good news because activity is definitely picking up. As we switch to our backside sun, you can also see another few sets of sunspots kind of sprinkled here and there. They're emerging quickly and then dying off quickly, but this is one more indication that our sun may be coming out of hibernation and is inching ever closer to starting Solar Cycle 25. After all the attention this past month on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, it's clear the 21st century version of the moon race is on. This time, however, there are far more players in the game, and the stakes are much higher. With a myriad of shuttle and lander designs already well underway, the car maker Toyota has also recently joined the fray, signing a three-year deal with JAXA to jointly develop a pressurized electric lunar rover that will greatly extend the human reach on the moon with an unprecedented ability to explore and even mine resources like lunar ice and shadowed craters. So it seems a lot of things are different this time around than when we first set foot on the moon back in the 60s. The expectations may be higher, but so is our experience when it comes to space missions. After all, we have had humans circling our planet for decades now in what we can call Hotel ISS. Indeed, the glint from the ISS has become an indelible feature of our night skies seemingly as perennial to our youngest generations as the stars themselves. But with all of this experience comes an expectation that we have conquered the hazards of space and can confidently sail the solar winds in search of distant starlit shores to explore. And if that is so, then why hasn't anyone thought to check the weather? Without an atmosphere on the moon to protect them, astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will need to dive into underground bunkers to shield themselves from hazardous solar radiation storms when they happen, especially once the sun becomes active again. And even sitting in their lunar land rovers, it's highly doubtful these astronauts would be shielded from the intense radiation. In fact, such hunks of metal might actually make radiation doses worse because these metal hulls emit their own radiation when being bombarded by such storms. And that's just the tip of the lunar iceberg. For more details on this week's space weather, including where a war was seen during this recent solar storm and what does all the sprinkling of new sunspots mean, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. You all seemed to enjoy our look back at STS-93 last week, so I thought I'd do another edition of yesterday's Tomorrow this week. This time we're going to take a peek at the space shuttle that never quite was, Enterprise. Enterprise was completed September 17, 1976. This was a prototype that was originally to be called Constellation, but after fans of Star Trek wrote to NASA in droves, its name was changed to Enterprise. It was given the designation of Orbital Vehicle 101, with NASA originally intending it to launch a communications satellite to space in July of 1981. Not much to the dismay of Star Trek fans around the world, that was never to be. Between the time this prototype was built and the final shuttle design was locked down, too many changes to the fuselage and wings had been made. It would simply be too complex and as such cost too much to retrofit Enterprise for space flight. Instead, they took the structural test article known as STA-99 and adapted that for flight, which was then known as Orbital Vehicle 99, which you probably know a little bit better as Space Shuttle Challenger. I do believe Enterprise was the only orbiter to make it over to Space Launch Complex 6 in California before they opted to mothball that pad after the Challenger disaster. It does make for some stunning images with the red service tower and the mountains rolling in the background though. And the reason I'm talking about Enterprise is because 42 years ago, this week, it became the first orbiter to ever fly on its own. In this video, Enterprise didn't have any engines and it was missing a real heat shield. It's sitting atop a modified Boeing 747 that was used to transport the orbiters from location to location called the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft or SCA. On August 12, 1977, the SCA let go of Enterprise for the very first time and it began its evaluation of the vehicle's flight control systems and subsonic handling in the atmosphere. There would be a total of five glide or approach and landing tests performed with Enterprise. In the final evaluation on October 26, 1977, the vehicle experienced a pilot-induced oscillation where it skipped and bounced down the runway several times before safely coming to a stop. Engineers would work to correct this issue before the first operational flight of Shuttle. From there, Enterprise made its way over to Launch Complex 39A to do pad fit tests and forge the way for the first operational space shuttles. That's our Space News Show this week. Thank you so much for watching and as a quick reminder, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's where you're going to find out when we're doing our next live shows, be it for space or steam. And a huge thank you to everyone who signed up to YouTube membership or our patrons of tomorrow. These are the people who allow us to make these shows week after week and keep our station on orbit. We could not do this without you. A huge heart-fed thank you to everyone in these lists. If you would like to become a citizen of tomorrow and help us continue to make these shows, head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join. Thank you so much for watching and remember to keep looking forward to tomorrow.