 Hello all, and welcome aboard Station 204. This week we have a slew of SpaceX stories and updates from Ryan. We're going to be talking a little bit about the European Space Agency and Roscosmos delaying their Mars rover to 2022 and our weekly space weather update with Dr. Tamethuskove. So let's go ahead and get this space news for this week, March 15th, 2020, started off by discussing the biggest story presently, which is the current and future impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the space industry. Since its beginnings in December, the spread of COVID-19 to pandemic levels across the world has played out in real time. Now, it's already affected industries such as travel and entertainment and spaceflight and space sciences is now beginning to feel the effects as well. Nearly every single conference you can think of has either been shortened, delayed to a later time, or outright canceled. Satellite 2020 ended a day earlier than planned. The Space Foundation's 36th annual Space Symposium has been delayed. The American Physical Society has delayed their March meeting. The American Astronomical Society is attempting to move its usual summer conference online. The European Southern Observatory has canceled public events, including suspending tours at its telescopes in La Silla and Parnell, even the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has canceled their meetings as well. And even where I work at Griffith Observatory is now officially closed to the public indefinitely. And it's not just exclusively conferences that are being affected by COVID-19 as well. NASA's Ames Research Center in Northern California had an employee test positive for contracting the virus, and all employees are now performing telework. While NASA as a whole is strongly advising employees to telework and NASA's Earth Science Airborne campaigns have been delayed to later this year. NASA's human spaceflight endeavors are moving ahead as scheduled, but there are going to be some tweaks to what they do before the flights in order to get the astronauts ready to go. NASA and Roscosmos already placed crews into a two-week quarantine before launch to the International Space Station. This is so if an astronaut is sick they can do so in that time period and not fall ill in space and be a vector for whatever bug they may have brought aboard. But NASA and Roscosmos are looking at extending the usual quarantine of the upcoming Soyuz MS-16 crew consisting of Anatoly Ivanishin, Ivan Wagner and Chris Cassidy. Crew operations won't be grinding to a halt though because space doesn't care what's happening here on the earth. But for things like companies and conferences and groups and agencies the next couple of weeks and probably couple of months are going to be very very difficult. There is one company that doesn't appear to be slowing down and that is SpaceX. And to talk a little bit about everything that they've been doing in the past week here is our update from Ryan. Hopefully Covid-19 won't affect SpaceX too much in the coming weeks and months because the development of Starship is continuing at a pace we haven't really seen with the project of this scale in the aerospace industry for an extremely long time. More construction is happening down in the south with the rings for the different sections of the future interplanetary transport vehicle being moved around for the final stacking of them for what is shaping up to be the SN3 vehicle. Amidst the stacking another building's framework was starting to appear which will probably be used for construction of the smaller parts of the vehicle or it will probably be used for the storage of anything that the team down there need to store. An interesting shot from this video from Boca Chica Gal gives us the ability to see the difference in nose construction from the SN1 vehicle and the SN2 vehicle. The SN1 nose looks more patched together but the SN2 nose looks a lot more polished and better constructed with each segment being perfectly aligned with one another. Now moving up north but without leaving Texas a new exhibit has opened at Space Center Houston which is the visitor complex for NASA's Johnson Space Center. The Falcon 9B1035 booster has found itself a new home as it is now on display at the first of its kind exhibit of a commercial rocket booster that has flown to space and landed again. This particular booster first launched back in 2017 on SpaceX's 11th commercial resupply mission and it was the 100th ever launch from the historic launch pad Launch Complex 39A. SpaceX have referred to this as a monument and I do agree with them because this is a historical moment as it is the first time that commercial space has really been shown in such a way to the public which will help to showcase the immense scale of this rocket. The closest thing to this would be the Falcon 9 outside of SpaceX's HQ but there was glass surrounding that so you can't really get up close to it so it's really incredible to see some of the brilliant photos that have been captured of the booster already. And before I end off this week SpaceX President Gwen Shotwell has said at the satellite 2020 conference that SpaceX are aiming for May to launch the DM2 mission. Although they are still unsure of the length of the mission this is extremely exciting news to know that humans will finally be launched off of US soil since the last flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis back in 2011. In a bit of delay news that for once isn't the space launch system the European Space Agency and Roscosmos have announced their Joint ExoMars mission the Rosalind Franklin rover and the Kesekoke lander will be delayed to launch in 2022. Further tests of spacecraft hardware and software were cited for the delay and there have been past problems during the tests of the supersonic parachutes that will slow ExoMars down before a propulsive landing. The COVID-19 pandemic hampering travel was also cited but no mention of the recent quality issues with Roscosmos Proton rocket contributing to this delay. All in all always a good idea to make sure you get everything right. You'd rather land in one piece than make a very expensive smear on Mars. Unlike last week we actually had a launch so let's head on over to China for our only launch this week. A long March 3B lofted a new Bidu navigation satellite from the Zhixiang Space Center on March 9th at 1155 Universal Time. Bidu is China's own homegrown navigation system and unlike GPS which is in medium earth orbit some Bidu satellites are in geosynchronous orbit like the one launched here. Chinese officials declared the launch a success and noted that with one more launch scheduled in May the Bidu navigation network will officially be online for global coverage. And here are your upcoming launches with a little bit of that music that you all like. And for your space weather update here's Dr. Tama Fascoe. Space weather this week is remaining a bit on the calm side but at least the sun's giving us some nice eye candy to look at. As we switch to our front side sun you can see the bright region in the southern hemisphere. This is a new cycle sunspot it was given the name 2758 as it's rotating into earth view and on the 11th it fires off a long duration flare. This is the first time we've had a long duration flare from one of these new cycle regions and it's letting us know that solar cycle 25 is definitely getting closer. Now even though this was a long duration flare it was only a B class flare so we don't have any issues for radio blackouts for radio coms with space launch or any kind of space traffic and since then this region's been kind of fizzling out a little bit so I don't think we're going to see any more activity from it. Now as we switch to our far-sutted sun this is stereo and it's looking at the sun from pretty much from the side. You can see region 2758 as it kind of rotates off of stereo's west limb there but look at that there's another bright region at high latitudes this time in the north. Yes this is once again yet another solar cycle 25 sunspot or at least a bright region. Now we've been watching this one rotate into stereo's view and it looks like it's going to be a bit more quiet so we probably aren't going to get any flares from it but it will boost the solar flux as it rotates into earth view and that's going to be good news for amateur radio operators and emergency responders. They should enjoy a little bit of boost in radio propagation here in the next couple days. For more details on this week's space weather including how those new cycle bright regions might affect you come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. To wrap up this week's space news I just want to remind everyone if you like watching the shows here at tomorrow consider subscribing to us liking our videos and setting up those notifications so that way you will know when we go live and also when we drop space news and of course I want to thank all of you who helped contribute to the shows here at tomorrow as well. We really can't do this without you and each and every one of you who does so you're amazing and it's greatly appreciated. If you'd like to contribute to the shows of tomorrow head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join to do so and check out all the great rewards we have available to you at different levels of support and of course all those things I mentioned previously including sharing our videos everywhere is one way that you can help as well and that's Miko for this week's space news. Thanks for joining us and until the next one remember keep exploring.