 Hello fellow citizens of Earth! It's time for your Space News for May 15th, 2019. Now we're going to go a little east of Station 204 here. We're going to hop across the Pacific to start off in Japan to talk about last week's space traffic. Lifting off May 3rd at 2145 universal time from a test stand near the town of Taki in the Hokkaido Prefecture of Japan, the third test flight of interstellar technology's MOMO sounding rocket on the MOMO-3 mission completed its first successful flight, reaching an altitude of 113.4 kilometers. It carried a 20 kilogram instrument package to take data during the flight. MOMO, which is Japanese for peaches, became the first commercially developed Japanese rocket to reach space. MOMO-3 is not a very big rocket. It's only 10 meters in length and 50 centimeters in diameter. The interstellar technology actually started from a successful $250,000 Kickstarter campaign. And since we just talked about some things that launched, let's go ahead and talk about some things that may eventually land. For that story, here's Lisa. We're going back to the moon and this time it's to stay. On May 9th we got our first look at the new lander which might be taking humans back to the moon for the first time in 50 years. Let me show you something. Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, revealed their lunar lander, Blue Moon, which has been developed in secret over the past three years. Capable of landing between 3.6 and 6.5 metric tons on the lunar surface, Blue Moon is the first step in enabling a future where millions of people can live and work in space. Blue Moon is far enough along in their development to help NASA reach their goal of landing humans on the moon again by 2024, with an enhanced human-rated version on the table. But the real game changer is how Blue Moon can improve the quality of our lives here on Earth. Imagine a world without the pollution and environmental destruction of mining and heavy industry. The moon is full of common resources like the iron used to make steel for construction, aluminum used in soda cans, which over 200 billion cans are drunk yearly worldwide, magnesium, titanium and silicon, essential for the computing device on which you're watching this video. Blue Moon can land with pinpoint accuracy using LiDAR and lunar landmarks to guide its descent. Each Blue Moon can carry four lunar rovers about the size of spirit and opportunity. With multiple landings at the same location, we could begin our first science and mining base on the moon. Multiple customers have already signed up and begun working on their payloads. But how will we bring these resources back to Earth? Blue Moon will use liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as fuel and a new engine, the BE-7, which will hot-fire for the first time this summer. They intend to land at Shackleton Crater at the Moon's South Pole, which is teeming with water ice. The water ice can be split into hydrogen and oxygen and used to refuel Blue Moon for a return trip. While on the surface, Blue Moon will use laser communications and X-band radio to communicate with Earth. However, it doesn't have any solar panels. In order to survive the two-week-long lunar night, gaseous hydrogen and oxygen that is warmed up and boiled off from the tanks will be combined in a fuel cell to generate electricity, just like the fuel cells that used to power the space shuttle. And interestingly, the fuel cells create a useful byproduct, water. Each Blue Moon lander that survives the lunar night will be our first water depots on the moon. So what do you think the first Blue Moon lander should be called? I think Endurance is a fitting name and a fitting praise to the great explorer Shackleton and it shows we're not just going back for flags and footprints this time, wearing it for the long haul. Speaking of future projects that will help us live and work in space, NASA and United Launch Alliance are partnering up to perform the largest test of an inflatable heat shield ever. Unlike SpaceX and Blue Origin who are betting on reuse of the booster is critical to bringing down the costs of spaceflight, United Launch Alliance views reuse of the engine assembly as critical to their plans. This could either make or break ULA, which has been feeling the pressure of lower prices since SpaceX entered the launch services market. ULA's plan is to jettison the engine assembly shortly after stage separation, which will perform entry protected by an inflatable heat shield. After entry, it will deploy a steerable parafoil, which will allow a helicopter to capture it in midair. The scheduled 2022 launch of the Joint Polar Satellite System 2 spacecraft for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been chosen for this demonstration as JPSS-2 only uses half of the payload lift capacity of the Atlas V rocket. NASA will provide the entry vehicle in the inflatable heat shield called the Low Earth Orbit Flight Test of an inflatable decelerator or the Great Bacronym Lofted. While ULA will supply high pressure tanks for inflation and launch services, neither at cost to the other under a No Funds Exchange Space Act Agreement. Not only will this test benefit ULA in development of their engine assembly's inflatable decelerator, but this also aligns with NASA's own pursuit of inflatable heat shields, which weigh significantly less than conventional aeroshells. This could allow for heavier payloads to be delivered not just to the surface of Mars, but also to be returned to Earth as well. And turning our gaze from the Earth to the Moon, here's Jay to talk a little bit about the Moon's weight loss program. What do you get when you cross 40 year old data with new high res imagery? A whole new load of evidence that the Moon is in fact still tectonically active. The Moon is shrinking. Having slimmed down about 50 meters over the last several hundred million years, it just so happens to be quaking in the process. As its interior cools and contracts, its brittle crust shrivels and cracks. These were thought to be ancient processes until 2010, when imagery from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter came along and surprised us with images of thrust faults that looked to be pretty much no older than 50 million years, which is relatively young, geologically speaking. These younger thrust faults have led us to believe that the Moon was pretty recently tectonically active and is most likely still active. And now, a new analysis using an algorithm developed by a team of researchers at the University of Maryland to reanalyze seismic data from the Apollo missions is giving us even more insight to these fresh lunar dynamics. Moonquakes were first detected by a series of five seismometers placed during the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1977. Researchers wanted to see if these moonquakes were connected to surface faults, which could link them to ongoing seismic activity. After layering the new data produced by the algorithm onto high-res imagery of the faults, they were better able to pinpoint the epicenter of 28 moonquakes. They found that at least eight of these 28 were within 30 kilometers of the faults, indicating that they were the results of pure tectonic activity. One of these included the Lee Lincoln Scarp, which was explored by the Apollo 17 astronauts, which had a moonquake occur just eight miles from it. These moonquakes measure about 2 to 5 on the Richter scale, which, if you live in California, would probably have a good idea of what that feels like. Now, there are other causes of moonquakes, such as asteroid impacts or tidal forces from the Earth. But just to be extra sure that these quakes weren't the result of something else, the researchers ran 10,000 simulations to figure out what the chances would be for it to be purely coincidental that these quakes happened so closely to the faults. The results? A less than 4 percent chance. This reinforces previous evidence from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, which imaged thousands of fault scarps and found that some had brighter surfaces than the surrounding terrain. Since radiation from space darkens the lunar surface, brighter signatures indicate a fresher surface that was more recently exposed to space. Study co-author Nicholas Schmer cites these findings as yet one more compelling reason to go back to the moon, but this time with much more modern equipment so that we can continue learning more about our beloved satellite. And he has a point. The more we look at the moon as a potential site for mining, manufacturing, and heck, even habitation, the more we should probably learn about its dynamics. So far we've talked about the Earth, Moon and Mars, and the one thing that impacts all three is the sun. And to talk about this week's space weather, we throw it over to Dr. Tamatha Scove. Space weather this week has gotten crazy busy, and it's all thanks to Regents 2740 and 2741. As we switch to our frontside sun, you can see them both here, and they've been doing exactly what we expected them to, firing solar storm after solar storm. Wham, bam, wham, bam. It's almost been ceaseless. We've already gotten hit by several of these solar storms that have brought aurora clear down to mid-latitudes and gave us a G3-level storm. And guess what? We've got two, possibly three more on the way that are Earth-directed, that are expected to hit us around the 15th and the 16th. So this is fantastic for solar minimum because we don't usually get stuff like this. Of course, now as we switch to our backside sun, well, the picture's a little bit more like what we'd expect. You can see the kind of the remnant of those regions leaving Stereo's West Lim view there. And then behind it, what do you see? Pretty much a sleepy sun. So once we get through these regions, which will be affecting us for probably another five to seven days, and boosting that solar flux for amateur radio operators and emergency responders, and giving us these wonderful solar storms that allow aurora photographers to have some fun, well, after that, it looks like we've got at least one week, maybe two weeks of quiet. Now taking a closer look at the solar storms that are on their way to Earth now, we switch to our solar storm prediction model, Enlil. Now this is Noah's version of the model. The top panel's density, the bottom panel's velocity, and you can see the first two solar storms being launched towards Earth. As a matter of fact, they look like they're going to be direct hits. The first one should hit Earth early in the morning or on the 15th and could last about a day and no sooner than we calm down from that one than we get, wham, hit by a second storm. It also looks like it's dead center, direct hit for Earth, and that could keep us storming for another day at least. Switching to our moon, we are now passing through the full moon phase with a full moon being on the 19th. And the night sky watchers and aurora watchers, well, you're going to have that bright moon to contend with over the next few nights, so you need to check your local rise and set times. For more details on this week's Space Weather, including when and where to see aurora, and why GPS reception could be a problem, especially with all these solar storms coming our way, come check out my channel or visit me at spaceweatherwoman.com. And thank you for watching this week's Space News. Don't forget, we have our live show every Saturday, including this Saturday, May 18th at 1800 universal time. This week we have Cameron James, the founder of Pacific Space Flight. These guys are building their own do-it-yourself spacesuits to enable cheaper access to human spaceflight. So if you maybe want to get some tips on how to make your own space suit or you're making your own space suit and you're having some problems, leave a comment down below and maybe we'll get some help for you from them. And of course we want to thank all of our patrons of tomorrow. You folks are the ones that help us make this show possible. We wouldn't be able to do any of this without you. So if you got something to value out of this and you'd like to give something back to us, you can head on over to patreon.com slash tmro or subscribe star.com slash tmro. If you can't do it financially, head on over to community.tmro.tv. We've got a multitude of ways that you can help us out. Until next week's Space News, keep exploring. Okay, so do you want me to admit that we missed this? Do you want me to admit that we're wrong to the internet? All right, fine, fine, fine. But the real game changer is how Blue Moon can help revolutionize our lives on Earth. That's not what I meant to say.