 The first Starship Launch Tower section has arrived at Pad 39A, SLS has done an incredible job at testing and Starliner finally has accrued. This is tomorrow's Space News. We're not starting in Starbase this week, we're starting at the Kennedy Space Center, as last week the first section of LC39A's Starship Pad was rolled through on some SPMTs or self-propelled modular transporters. This move was done in the middle of the night to minimise the disruption on the roads which the segment had to use and also to make it harder for anyone to spot what SpaceX were actually doing. Slowly SpaceX are starting to develop their East Coast Starship Launch Pad. It's just a shame that the obvious government restrictions means that live cameras can't be dotted all over the place observing what the ground teams are constructing. Such restrictions are not in place at Boca Chica though, so we always know what SpaceX are up to down in South Texas. For example, here's the can crusher being moved down to the launch site. It's designed to pull down on a booster or a test article to simulate different aerodynamic loads during the flight. This was followed by the B7.1 test tank being lifted onto a transport stand in High Bay One. Unsurprisingly, in the middle of the night, B7.1 was rolled down the highway to the launch site to join the can crusher and that was followed a couple days later with a lift onto the testing stand with its cap being attached to the top ready to pull down very hard. I think it's safe to say expect some testing soon. There hasn't really been much to note on ships this week however we did get to see a forward dome for Ship 25 still using the older taller style of domes. It's been obvious ever since SpaceX started construction of the orbital launch pad at Starbase that they will not be digging a flame trench however they have installed flame diverters on the mounts. They're also not digging, stroke constructing a flame trench in Florida as the water table doesn't allow for that. It's also nice to see Star Factory continuing construction. Siding has now been mounted onto the majority of the building with about one third of the back in this shot still waiting to be mounted. The small building at the SPMT yard also looks to be nearing the end of construction from the outside. Obviously, it still needs a roof but it looks like the siding is nearly complete. For the longest time, the crew of Starliner's crewed flight test was TBA, TBA and TBA but finally the astronaut pair who will be the first to fly on Starliner have been announced. Commanding the mission will be Barry Butch Wilmore with pilot Sonny Williams flying alongside. Originally, Sonny was assigned as the commander of the first operational flight of Starliner, Starliner 1 and the backup pilot of the crew test flight with Nicole Mann flying as the pilot for the CFT. Mann has now been transferred over to SpaceX's crew 5 due to the delays with Starliner needing to the switcheroo. The current ISS schedule means that all is required for the test flight is a short duration mission. NASA also originally said that about SpaceX's demo 2 mission however that flight was extended and the option to do that with Boeing's test flight is there. NASA can extend the mission by up to six months and they also have the option of adding a third crew member. This redundancy is very useful if there is an issue with one of the next SpaceX crewed flights. Butch Wilmore is a spaceflight veteran previously flying on two previous occasions, clocking up a total of 178 days in space so far. Most recently, they flew up on Soyuz to the International Space Station being a part of Expedition 41 and 42 in 2014 and 15. They also flew onboard Atlantis for the STS-129 mission in 2009 to the ISS making the wait for the Starliner test the longest of their career so far. Sonny Williams is also a spaceflight veteran being selected by NASA 22 years ago in 1998. She flew up to the ISS on STS-116 for their first spaceflight in 2006 and flew back down six months later on STS-117. During this mission, she also broke the record at the time for the most number of spacewalks during a mission by a woman with four EVAs adding up to just over 29 hours floating in the darkness of space. Her second flight into space was in 2012 on board of Soyuz alongside Akihiko Hoshide, someone else who has been involved in the commercial crew program flying on SpaceX's crew too. Sonny now holds a total of 322 days in space, the sixth longest as an American and the second longest as an American woman. I think it's safe to say she is definitely qualified for this flight. I think it's a fair assessment to say that Firefly Aerospace has had a bit of a turbulent time over the past few months surrounding the leadership of the company. Ukrainian co-founder Max Polyakov was essentially forced to sell his stakes in the company by the US government after saving them from bankruptcy. However, Russia did then invade Ukraine, which could be seen as a justification. There's another change in town now for Firefly as the other co-founder, Tom Markuzik, has stepped down from their role as CEO of the company just as they're preparing for their second launch attempt. Markuzik is staying on the board of the company though. They've assumed the position of chief technical advisor and their minority investor. The new owners at AE Industrial Partners are looking for new leadership of the company to try and invigorate Firefly alongside their funding. Markuzik has said in a statement that the future is bright for Firefly and the time is right for a new leader. Before this new leader is found, however, Peter Schumacher, another partner at AEI, will serve as the interim CEO. What do you think of this decision and does it surprise you? Let me know in the comments as this is something I don't think anybody was expecting. If we cast our minds back all the way into last year, 2021, you may remember that Russia conducted an anti-satellite test where they flew a missile to intercept an old Soviet-era satellite and blow it up. Now what harm has that caused? It's created a debris field orbiting Earth several times a day, made up of over 1,500 pieces. The International Space Station, for the first time last week, had to avoid this debris, which makes this topic so much more important. Progress MS-20, which launched at the start of the month, used its onboard main thruster to move the space station well clear of the debris, so as to not endanger the astronauts and cosmonauts lives on board the orbital laboratory. Head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, later confirmed on Telegram that the spacecraft had made an unscheduled manoeuvre. The burn lasted 4 minutes and 34 seconds, so this wasn't just a short blip. NASA later confirmed that even without this manoeuvre, the debris could have passed by half a mile away, however safety is the number one priority, and it's better to be safe than sorry. Hopefully from now on, countries won't perform these reckless tests as the orbital debris could end up being deadly. The smaller fragments are harder to track, and they're just as deadly. Quickly before we get into all of last week's launches, the Space Launch System rocket, which will be flying the Artemis-1 mission, has finished the first attempt of the second round of wet dress rehearsal attempts, or the fourth attempt overall. That's not confusing. The countdown reached T-minus 29 seconds, 20 seconds earlier than we were expecting, but stopping 20 seconds short is a massive improvement over the faults NASA were having to deal with last time around. This imagery, by the way, was published by Maxar. This is a satellite capture. It's not a helicopter or anything like that. It's crazy. But there are still things that need to be ironed out, such as hydrogen leaks, as SLS suffered another one this time around. It was in a different location to the original leak, this one being inside a quick disconnect hooking the core stage up to the mobile platform. Engineers tried to fix the problem by holding the countdown for several hours, heating up the connector before calling it again, however, this method did not work. At this point, the launch team decided to just mask the problem from the computer running the countdown and continue into the final 10 minutes. The biggest visual indicator that we were moving into the final stages of the countdown was the vectoring of the four RS-25 engines, which haven't vectored underneath the rocket on a launchpad since the final stages of the countdown of STS-135 back in 2011. Sadly, I can't find footage of this, so what you're looking at right now is a gimbal test performed inside of the VAB prior to rollout. The stop at T-minus 29 seconds instead of T-minus 9.34 seconds, to be precise, might sound like a big issue, but in comparison to the scale of how much the Artemis team achieved with this wet dress attempt, it isn't. On the day of this episode's airing, there is a planned teleconference on the matter where we'll find out what NASA plans to do over the coming days and weeks, but of course, this script was written before that happened, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next episode of the news when I cover all of that. For a little sneak preview, though, NASA will either accept this test and go back to the VAB to get SLS ready for launch, or they'll go for a fifth attempt. From launch testing to actual launches, let's head into traffic. We had a few launches between the last episode and this one starting with Starlink Group 4, Mission 19. Leaving launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1609 Coordinated Universal Time on Friday, this was the start of SpaceX's triple header and what a start it was. Giftoff marked the 100th reflight of a booster, 100th, and SpaceX's 50th launch from the historic site that is 39A. When booster B-1060 returned from its duties and landed on a short full of gravitas, it became the first booster to complete 13 flights, and it marked the 50th consecutive successful landing of an orbital-class booster. Those stats are just incredible. The next day, and we were on the west coast of the USA, as at 1419 UTC on June 18th, Sara-1 launched into a sun-synchronous orbit from Slickfall East at Vandenberg Space Force Base. Sara-1 is the first of three new radar military satellites built by Airbus for the German military, replacing the Star Lupe constellation. Booster B-1071 completed its third flight successfully by touching down in the fog on Landing Zone 4. The final flight of this triple header was Global Star 2 FM-15, as well as a suspicious unknown payload. The launch commenced bright and early in the morning at 04.27 UTC on Sunday, still Saturday night local time from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. Following this, B-1061 landed, you guessed it, successfully on Just Read the Instructions, which is one of the oddities about this flight. The payload satellite is regularly light, so a drone ship landing shouldn't be required. There is also a mid-course correction burn nowhere near the equator, which again is suspicious as this type of orbit adjustment is most efficient near the equator. We also didn't see second stage views until second engine start too, so there was either something very secret joining FM-15 for the ride or this was a coincidence. But it was also an interesting payload dispenser, similar to the dispenser seen on rideshare flights, so I definitely thought that there was something going on here at this point. It was later confirmed by Jonathan McDowell on Twitter that four secret payloads alongside a piece of debris were being tracked in orbit around the Earth. So yes, something fishy was definitely happening with this launch. The final launch this week, however, is the second test flight of Neary, which launched at 0700 UTC, 1700 local time, on June 21st from Launch Complex 2 at the Nara Space Center in South Korea. Officially known as the KSLV-2, this is South Korea's first domestic rocket, as some of their previous rocket technology was developed in Russia. The launch was pushed from June 16th due to a dodgy sensor in the first stage liquid oxygen tank, and it successfully placed its dummy payload into a 700 km orbit on the second time of asking. Tomorrow, June 22nd, an Ariane 5 will be launching BSAT 3D and GSAT 24, will then have Capstone on Electron, Starlink 421 from SpaceX, and then another Falcon 9 flight with SES-22. And here's your space weather with Dr. Tamethasco. Space weather this week is definitely turning on the eye candy. We used to have a spotless sun about a week ago, but my goodness, look how things have changed. There are no less than eight active regions on the Earth-facing disk. In fact, back on the 13th we had a massive solar storm launch from region 3030 and 3032. This launched a beautiful solar storm that had a gorgeous signature in coronagraphs, but sadly this solar storm went pretty much to the east of Earth and it only side swiped us, which bumped us up to storm levels. It was enough to do that, but it wasn't the long-lasting storm we were hoping for. Things are already beginning to calm down, and on top of that we've got a little bit of fast solar wind from the coronal hole that's been rotating in through the airstrikes zone, but that's also going to calm down in the next day or two, and things are going to quiet down at least on the solar storm front. Meanwhile, we do have multiple big flare players, including region 3036, 3037, and then of course 3030. These are all M-flare players and they've actually given us about a 10% chance of an X-class flare, so we're definitely watching these as they continue to give us small radio blackouts and things of that nature. We also have potential for radiation storms, but that has also kind of died down and will continue to be a low-level threat over the next few days. Now as we switch to 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 back on the 13th, all of those big regions kind of in the middle of the sun, whoosh, do you see that big brightening and then kind of like a release? That was the big solar storm that was launched to the east of Earth. It was a massive solar storm and that basically quieted down all of these regions. We've been getting a few big flares from there, but not really anything substantial when it comes to solar storms. However, Earth-directed solar storms are still on the menu. For more details on this week's Space Weather, including how those big flare players might affect you, come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. If you haven't noticed yet, there is a blue join button below this video, and these are some of the people who have pressed it. Starting with the ground support citizens, we then have the suborbital and orbital tiers, and then we have the escape velocity level. As perks for supporting the show, members get access to different exclusive discord channels, scripts as they're being written, as well as membership exclusive videos and live streams here on the channel. Escape Velocity used to be the highest option, and trust me, it's still a super generous level. We love you all so much. But we now, thanks to Jamie, have the Tomorrow Model 33 Plaid Pro Plus level. Neuro Stream is joined, and as a Tomorrow Model 33 Plaid Pro Plus member, they get to help design their own slate, which is what you're looking at right now. If you want to join all these epic people, head to the join button below or youtube.com forward slash TMR over slash join, and become a citizen of Tomorrow for as little as one US dollar a month. Now, thanks to Neuro Stream, not only have they joined the new highest level, they've also very generously topped up the rest of my GoFundMe campaign, so we have officially reached the £7,000 target. This now means that all the essentials are covered, and the trip will be happening, but if you want to help me upgrade equipment and purchase other items, which will improve the quality of the psyche coverage, head over to the link and help as you wish. To make sure you don't miss any of the psyche coverage, subscribing will ensure that videos and hopefully live streams show up in your subscriptions feed, so make sure that no go red button is turned go by clicking it. That's all from me this week, again, thank you so much to Neuro Stream, and to you all, goodbye.