 Welcome, citizens of Earth, to this week's episode of the news. We've had some interesting developments down at Starbase. Raptor 2 has been spotted in testing, plans filed for a new Starship factory at the Kennedy Space Center. Three different small-sat rocket tests and a bit of space traffic activity, so stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News, which is for the week of January 25th, 2022. We've waited a long time since Elon first announced Raptor 2, the next generation of Raptor engine, and we know they've been working on it for a while now with footage of plumes of vapor coming out over the last few weeks, but never before publicly have we seen one after testing. Gary Blair of NASA Space Flight took this photo of two Raptors on the test stand in McGregor, Texas, and also zoomed in for us so we can see the engines in higher detail. The engine plumbing seems to be a lot more compacted, at least in rocketry terms, when compared to the latest version of Raptor 1, waiting around at Starbase. Getting this as tight as possible is key to not waste materials on pointless bits that you don't need. Making it smaller also means that you can fit more engines closer together, something which is needed as the new versions of Super Heavy get their increased engine counts and the Raptor vacuum engines on Starship doubles from 3 to 6. You can also see in this photo, and as I've spoken about previously, on the news that SpaceX have other bays, including horizontal testing areas, which you can see at the top of the picture. Hopefully soon, we'll see the first of these make their way from McGregor to Starbase, where the next generation engines will be mated to their respective vehicles. A quick seven-hour drive down I-35 and I-37 will take you from McGregor to Boca Chica, where Boca Chica gal spotted some new smooth nose cones through the doorway of Tent 3. They do look quite nice and will have to wait and see if they are used for tests or ships. One of the nose cones didn't hang around for long, as just a while later it was rolled out of the tent to sit alongside the cargo door pathfinder. Time for the highly detailed Weekly Wide Bay update. They've added some beams to the third section. That's it. No new sections, just beams. A couple weeks ago we saw the demise of Booster 3 after being pulled apart and taken to the scrapyard, and this week we saw the demise of Ground Service Equipment Test Tank 4 as it popped during a cryogenic test. When doing cryogenic tests, SpaceX fills these tanks up with liquid nitrogen, so if or when they pop like this, it will just evaporate into the atmosphere. Whoever's car this is though did get a bit of a splash. An area of ground has been cleared near the wide and high base, which could be a sign of more construction to come. Last Saturday, Ship 20 was lifted off sub-orbital pad B, where it has been for a while now and it was placed onto the transport stand, which is specially designed just to carry starships around, and then the following day it was moved down to be near the orbital launch pad, and I mean near. If it got any closer, it would actually be on the pad. A robotic welder has been seen in the high bay, helping out to stick together the different ring sections of Booster 7's methane tank. I'll be honest, I would have never thought of putting a robotic welder in the high bay, and now I've seen it. That is actually quite clever. Right back at the start of Starship Development about three years ago, SpaceX were using a facility at the Kennedy Space Center alongside Boca Chica in Texas to develop up the Starship prototypes before they shortly stopped that just to focus everything around Starbase. Following on from the announcement that the LC39A Starship pad had restarted construction, SpaceX has just published plans for three new buildings, two of which have a footprint of about 1,900 square meters, with the largest of the three having a footprint of about 30,000 square meters, with the option of a future extension adding an extra 17,800 square meters onto the footprint. The site on Robert's Road is situated about a third of the way from the KSC Visitor Complex to the VAB, and in this animation I've taken the plans and overlaid them on top of Google Earth imagery, so hopefully you can get a sense of the size and location of the structures. Harry Stranger on Twitter has compiled just the outline of the building on top of the most recent satellite imagery of the Starbase production site, and it is even bigger than the tents, the high bay, the mid bay, and the wide bay combined. It is also slightly larger in footprint than SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Sadly, because these proposals are only to check out the drainage of the area, we have no clue on the height of these buildings, so those little buildings could be high base or just short boxes. The big building in the middle could be really tall, or it could just be an array of tents like we see at Starbase. To wrap up the SpaceX update, Elon Musk has tweeted this very interesting animation of a super heavy landing being simulated onto the catch arms. The biggest difference I can see when compared to the very good fan-made animations out there is the fact that the chopsticks don't move at all. Many of the renders already on the internet show the catch arms zipping up and down the orbital launch tower, but it looks like SpaceX are just going to be aiming for it with the booster and not moving the arms depending on the booster's position. It is also important to note that unlike Falcon Boosters, super heavy can actually hover. NASA has announced that they've awarded a $250,000 contract to ATA Engineering, a company based out of San Diego, to provide engineering support services for the inflatable beam module, otherwise known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module of the International Space Station. As many of you will know and it is in the name, the module was built by Bigelow Aerospace and they provided these services until December of last year, but as they laid off their entire workforce in 2020, someone else had to take over the role. According to NASA, ATA Engineering is the only company qualified to provide the support needed as they were a subcontractor to Bigelow during the development of Beam and the support of the module. The company was also part of the analysis which confirmed that the lifespan of the module could be extended to as late as 2032. In December, Bigelow also transferred the title and ownership of the beam to NASA's Johnson Space Center as the engineering contractor expired. If you were wondering if ATA are going to be taking over development as well, they are. They are purely focused on maintaining the current module. ABL Space Systems, one of the many upcoming small satellite launch providers, has announced that the second stage they are or were developing of their RS1 launch vehicle was destroyed in an accident during testing last week. Observers around the Mojave Air and Spaceport have reported that they heard a boom around 2130 UTC on January 19th, which was shortly followed by a plume of black smoke which you can see here, which was caught by cameras which were a part of the alert wildfire tracking network. Dan Paimon, the president of ABL Space Systems, did confirm that an incident had happened during a test and that they also said everybody is safe and the team did a good job of saving the test stand. That is of course the most important thing that nobody was injured and even though blowing up rockets is usually bad, if you don't find the limits of something during testing then you'll never know how far your vehicle can go. Some news on another small satellite launcher, Astra CEO Chris Kemp tweeted this video of the first ever static fire to take place on Slick 46, ahead of their first launch out of the Cape. The test was a success and the company will soon be announcing the launch date once the FAA grants them their launching licence. Peter Beck tweeted on Saturday that Rocket Lab were doing some more helicopter catch tests that day and that the team have not missed one yet. A few days later Rocket Lab tweeted this video of one of the drop tests which is great to see. Hopefully they'll be confident in getting the new Silver and Red booster flying soon as that will be the first proper catch attempt during a launch. Over the last week we had some other interesting rocket activity but instead of static fires or catching tests they launched off of a pad so let's get into the traffic. Starting off the space traffic is the launch of Stunning Group 4 Mission 6 atop the Falcon 9 B106O booster. Lifting off at 0202 Coordinated Universal Time on January 19th from launch complex 39A in Florida all 14,500kg of Stunning satellites are starting their racing procedures to move them from their current 339x210 53.2 degree inclination orbits to a 540km low Earth orbit. B106O smoothly touched down on a short full of gravitas just under 9 minutes into flight to become the next booster to successfully launch and land 10 times. Next up we have the launch of USSF-8 on an Atlas V ULA's first flight of 2022 and the first ever flight of the 511 Big Slider variant of the rocket. This meant that it had a 5m of faring, just one solid rocket booster and one engine on the center upper stage. Power sliding off Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 1900 UTC on the 21st of January, both of the geosynchronous space situational awareness program satellites were smoothly carried to a near geosynchronous orbit 36,000km above the Earth. We then had an ISS departure a couple days later on the 23rd of January at 1535 UTC as Dragon C209 undocked from the Harmony Zenith port. The spacecraft achieved 32 days docked to the station and it's crashed down at 2105 UTC on January 24th to be picked up by Go Searcher. Coming up over the next 7 days we have a long march for B-Launch Falcon 9 with CSG2, another Falcon with Starlink Group 4-7, Unconfirmed State of Elena 41 on Astrid Rocket 3 and Acquires I1A and then another Falcon 9 with NROL87. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tamatha Scove. Space weather this week is definitely holding our attention. As we take a look at our Earth-facing disc, back on the 20th if you look on the west limb you can see region 29-29. Wham! Right there, did you see that? It fires off an M5.5 class flare. This launches a small radiation storm that lasted for a few days at Earth and also if you can see whoosh right there that launches a solar storm. It's kind of like shaken up by that solar flare and so you know it kind of destabilizes those regions. So we actually had two solar storms that were launched off to the west of Earth. Now one of them kind of grazes Earth right about now. We're not seeing much of an effect but it does kind of clear the way because we do have from the southern hole right here this coronal hole is rotating in through the Earth strike zone and that fast wind stream hey now it's decluttered. It doesn't have to sweep out all the junk in the way so we've got a fast solar wind that's going to be hitting Earth here in the next day or so. That's going to be followed by some more fast wind from a second coronal hole that's here in the north. We've got two bursts of fast solar wind. We could easily be getting some storming from that here and that's not all. Take a look at the east limb. Do you see this? Wham! Right there, there is another solar storm launched. This is a beautiful solar storm. It's not Earth-directed. This one's going to go east of Earth and then look in the north. Woosh! There goes yet another solar storm. So the Sun is really getting active and we're going to have to pay close attention because this region over here 2934 is a solar storm producer and it could easily be rotating and giving us another solar storm in the Earth strike zone here in the next couple days. Switching to our radiation storm threat meter you can see back on the 20th after we had that big M5.5 class flare you can see those radiation storm particle fluxes jump up and they passed the S1 radiation storm threat level but look they didn't last all that long and that's good news. This was due to the fact that that solar storm and that solar flare were actually launched to the west of Earth and that solar storm did not pass Earth so it allowed those fluxes to die down pretty quickly but as you can see both the blue and the green traces are also elevated that means that the spectrum is a bit on the harder side because that they actually had higher energy particles in there and that's not necessarily good news for aviation passengers. And as we switch to our C's real-time radiation monitor in Geo you can see the total dose for satellites in Geo is actually elevated into the yellow. This is once again due to those solar energetic particle events. Luckily that dose has kind of died back down over the last couple days but if you notice the internal charging is now beginning to pick up well that could even get a little bit worse and that's due to those fast solar wind streams that will end up hitting Earth over the next couple days so if you happen to be a satellite operator in Geo just understand you have multiple sources right now for anomalies on your spacecraft so stay vigilant. For more details on this week's space weather including how that big solar flare and the radiation storm might be affecting space traffic come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Just before we wrap up for another week thank you to all the citizens of tomorrow who aid us financially every month. 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