 This was an incredible week. And before we get into the SpaceX Launch Escape Test, and we've got a little bit of footage from the Boeing Starliner capsule itself, I did want to take a moment to ask you to hit that like, subscribe, and then mash on that notification bell. About 50% of the people who watch this show are not subscribed. And if you hit that subscribe button, maybe we'll be able to hit that 100,000 subscriber mark by the end of 2020. Right now, YouTube says we won't do it till 2021, and I would love to prove them wrong. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Now, for those who don't know, I actually work at SpaceX, but I'm not an official sports person for SpaceX, which means I can't talk about SpaceX. So for that launch abort test, I've got a brand new SpaceX correspondent. So take it away, Ryan. So let's just say, SpaceX News has been kind of hectic this past week, and I originally wrote this segment for release last week, realized that I wouldn't have time to shoot it for last week, and then the in-flight abort test was happening. So let's get right into that. For possibly one of the most exciting Falcon 9 launches this year, the test was a huge success. The naked booster launched at approximately 1530 UTC on January 19th, and the booster being used was B1046, which was the first Block 5 booster to be launched on May 11th of 2018. Now, I do find it quite sad that they did decide to get the booster be destroyed and not store it in a museum somewhere since it was the first Block 5 booster, but it did lead to a very cool-looking fireworks display for all of us to watch. At 86 seconds into flight, the 9 million 1D engines performed a simulated failure, or in other words, they prematurely shut down all of the main engines, which led to the crew dragon capsule automatically triggering an abort as it fired all eight of its Super Draco thrusters, which ignited for eight seconds, allowing the spacecraft to get to a safe distance away from there at this time, destroyed Falcon 9 booster. The spacecraft ditched its unpressurized trunk section, flipped itself around ready for the eight minute coast back down to the Atlantic Ocean. At eight minutes and 57 seconds into flight, the capsule made a safe splashdown, which allowed the recovery teams to swoop in and recover the vehicle. Now that the escape system has been proven to work at Max-Q, which is a period of time when the vehicle is experiencing the most amount of aerodynamic pressure in flight, it's full steam ahead for Demo Mission 2 with astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Benking later this year. And now, you're gonna see me from about a week ago. While CEO Elon Musk has been dancing around in China with his electric car company, SpaceX haven't been quiet, as in fact they have been increasing their not-so-little-any-more collection of Starlink satellites in Earth orbit with its first 2020 launch of the Falcon 9 at 219 UTC on January 7th. Like the previous Starlink launch, 60 satellites are sent into orbit by the Falcon 9 to expand the constellation of the future high-speed internet provider. However, unlike the previous launch, one of the satellites had a special coating to reduce the albedo of its bodywork. The way that the Starlink satellites are launched means that until they've reached a desired orbit of 550 kilometers, the satellites are closely clustered together and in a low-drag configuration, making them appear more visible to the ground. And it could take anywhere from one to four months before the satellites reach that desired 550 kilometer orbit. Ground-based telescopes and astronomers don't really appreciate bright lights in the sky when they are trying to focus on a certain object in the cosmos. And if SpaceX is going to be launching 60 satellites every two weeks, that means that over 1,000 satellites are going to be in orbit. And that means there will be a lot of light. So as well as doing the experimental coating, SpaceX also provided leading astronomy groups with predictive two-line elements, which is basically a data format that encodes a list of the satellite orbital elements for a given point in time. Using this, they could work out the position and velocity of the satellites so they would know what they could slash couldn't look at with their telescopes, which I think is a pretty good call by SpaceX to try and help out the astronomical community, get the best possible outcome for them, as well as SpaceX. And not being able to see parts of the sky because of a large number of large, bright satellites really isn't a good thing because space telescopes are really expensive. Sometimes aren't even focused properly when you get into orbit, like Hubble. And some take a really long time to launch, like the James Webb Space Telescope. Like seriously, when is that thing launching 2021? Yeah, we need to make these satellites less reflective. Otherwise, we might not even be able to get the super fast global broadband that so many remote places need. Because even though ground observation has discovered so many incredible things in the past, in this day and age, internet connectivity is one of the most essential things in our lives. And I think that if people have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, then this may be a small price to pay for a large A to everybody here on Earth. When most batteries are starting satellites are launched, you have the chance to see a train of them all together. Now, in my opinion, these look really, really cool just to know that then trails of light in the sky can help me connect to the internet. So if you'd like to check when you could see a train of satellites, I'd recommend N2YO.com as they'll let you track latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity, and so many more factors about the satellites. And you can even check, like, you can even check the last Starlink launch. They're still tracking them, it's incredible. And that isn't the only piece of news to Hawthorne-based rocket company brings us this week as the DragonCapture used on the CRS-19 mission, which launched December 5th, safely smashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 1540 UTC on January 7th, which was just a few hours after that Starlink launch. The capture had 3,800 pounds, or 1,724 kilograms of cargo to bring back down to the Earth. This Dragon spacecraft had also been used on the CRS-4 mission in September, 2014, and the CRS-11 mission in June of 2017. Elon Musk has also shared on Twitter the design of the Starlink ground terminals with them being, and I quote, a thin, flat, round UFO on a stick. The terminals will also have motors so they can point to the optimal angle in the sky, and that to install the emergency to plug them in, I'll point them in the sky. He also made it clear that these instructions can be completed in any order. SpaceX is extremely close to launching astronauts to the International Space Station, but let's not forget about Boeing. While we don't know if Boeing will need to redo their uncrewed test flight that happened in late 2019, when I sort of read the tea leaves, it really is sounding like they're not going to need to. And that may be okay. So long as they got enough test data to show that they can keep astronauts and the space station safe. And in my opinion, let's just do this thing. What you've been looking at here is footage from inside Boeing Starliner during this OFT-1 or Orbital Flight Test mission. You can see the very small vibe impact on instrumentation during launch, and also just how smooth that ride looks to be. We get to see the little plush snoopy with an astronaut helmet floating around, their version of Little Earth or a zero G indicator. It's cute, fun, and snoopy has an amazing history with the space program. Then in the end, plasma shoots past the window as the vehicle re-enters the atmosphere. It's an absolutely stunning sight, and I would personally love to see that myself someday. The final little bump you see here at the end is the spacecraft safely touching down on land for the very first time. All in all, it looked like a very successful test. Now it's time for the engineers to look at the data, sharpen their pencils, and make some decisions on the next steps forward. Let's turn our attention over to traffic leaving the Earth with our space traffic report. First up, we have China. A Long March 2D rocket took to the skies on January 14th, 2020 at 02.53 universal time. Aboard, the Earth Observation Satellite Yiling-1. The satellite is part of a planned constellation of imaging satellites that will provide super-wide coverage with a resolution better than one meter and is also capable of high-speed data transmission. And this is going to be a very busy year for China as they're planning on launching 50 times this year up from the 34 that they did last year. Next up is a commercial satellite launch also from China. The solid fuel Qiaos-1A rocket lifted off January 16th at 03.02 universal time. Aboard was a test satellite for Galaxy Space who plans on launching 144 of these in low Earth orbit, which will provide Q-Band, V-Band, and K-A-Band broadband services in the next few years. And finally this week, we have Ariane Space reaching the inky blackness of the cosmos on January 16th, 2105 universal time. The first of their planned 22 launches of 2020. This mission included the UTEL-SET Connect Communication Satellite, as well as the GSAT-30 Direct-to-Home Video Satellite for India. Now let's shift from space traffic to space weather. Dr. Tamatha Scove brings us the latest from our local star. Space weather this week continues to ratchet up in activity. As we switch to our front-side sun, you can see on the 14th blammo right there we had a solar storm launch. Now this storm was Earth-directed, but it really didn't affect us all that much because it was pretty weak. But hey, who cares? It's a new solar storm launch. We haven't seen that since we've been sitting in the solar minimum, so we're very happy about that. Now on top of that, we also had a small active region. This looks like a solar cycle 25 sunspot. It actually was a sunspot for a short moment before it dived back underneath the surface. Oh well, so much for that, but it's still good signs of new activity. Now also we have a coronal hole that's gonna be rotating into the Earth strikes and but it's very small coronal hole, so don't expect a lot from that. Maybe a little aurora at high latitudes. Now switching to our far-side sun, this is the view from stereo. It's kind of looking at the sun from the side. There's not a lot going on, but you do see up in the northeast quadrant you can see an active region rotating into stereo's view. This looks like a solar cycle 25 sunspot as well and you can see it looks like it's actively flaring. So it looks like as this region rotates into Earth view over the next couple of days, we are gonna continue the fun. And now for your Martian Minute. With the Mars 2020 NASA rover launch plan for later this year and manned missions to mine ice on the moon by 2024, the race is on to find habitable places on the red planet for the first human colonists to land. So where will it be? Near water ice deposits of course, but to find ice on Mars shallow enough for the colonists to dig up, not such an easy task until now. In a paper published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists have provided the first map of water ice believed to be as little as two and a half centimeters below the surface. Engineers planning a Martian mission have long known that water ice is a key for any potential landing site because human colonists will have to harvest this ice for drinking water and for making rocket fuel. Using two heat sensitive instruments aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO, and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, scientists have made what is affectionately called a treasure map of Mars. This map shows where water ice could potentially be within the digging ability of ice mining colonists. Using temperature changes on the Martian surface, along with other correlative data, the colored regions on the map reveal a trove of water ice beneath the surface throughout the Martian poles. But the real treasure is the particularly shallow deposits at mid-latitudes, which are ideal for colonists to mine. Sovapiku, the leader author on the study, says, quote, you wouldn't need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel, unquote. Indeed, back in 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander did exactly that and it even took pictures of the ice it scraped up in the permafrost near the poles. Since then, MRO has taken many images of meteor impacts that have exposed similar ice beneath the surface. So while there are severe limits imposed on possible landing sites for human colonization, some promising possibilities have emerged. Scientists are particularly interested in an area just northwest of Olympus Mons called Arcadia, Planitia, where the water ice is less than 30 centimeters below the surface. Highlighted in the map with an abundance of blue and purple, right now it is the clear winter due to its plentiful sunlight, warmer temperatures, and its generally lower elevation, which provide more atmospheric drag to slow down an incoming spacecraft, perfect for a gentle landing. And speaking of perfect, right now near the equator at Elysian, Planitia, the InSight Lander is enjoying a nice sunny day. Currently, it's a balmy minus 16 degrees Celsius with a low of minus 97 and the winds are out of the South Southeast at 20 meters a second. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see Aurora and how GPS and radio communications for space traffic is going to fare, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. This Space News episode talked a lot about testing for commercial crew. Some of these tests have been great. Some of them have been not so great, but all of them have yielded incredible data. And testing space capsules is nothing new. In fact, 53 years ago, this week, there was an Apollo test you probably never heard of and did not go as expected. Let me paint the picture here. It's January 20th, 1967 and NASA is testing a third stage of their mighty Saturn V rocket, specifically known as the S4B launch vehicle 503. It just rolls right off the tongue. It was built by Douglas Aircraft Company and had one J2 engine on board. This particular stage would never see space. 10 seconds before the simulated ignition of the Saturn V first stage and about eight minutes before the ignition of this specific test article, a weld in one of the helium tanks failed. The resulting release of energy completely destroyed not just the engine and stage, but the actual test stand itself. Yikes. Investigators found that one of the helium storage spheres had been built using the wrong weld material. Now that resulted in a weaker than anticipated tank weld and well, big badaboom. And yes, this video you're watching right now is actually of the S4B interior showing said helium spheres. That's pretty cool. One year, two days later or 52 years ago this week, a Saturn 1B with another S4B second stage launched on Apollo 5, putting the LM1, the first lunar lander to reach space into Earth orbit. It just goes to show that an anomaly in testing doesn't necessarily mean a huge setback for the program as a whole. It's just a data point. And that data point can be used to make your vehicle better and safer. All right, that's our show. I hope you enjoyed it and I wanted to give a huge shout out and thank you to all of the citizens of tomorrow who helped to make this specific episode happen. The people you see on the screen right now they contribute week after week and month after month to the show helping us keep the station on orbit and the lights on. We couldn't do this without you and you all get special content. In 2020, we're trying to bring you even more. Get you better, more awesome rewards, go live more awesome, do anything we can to make this a really compelling offering for you and building you new content week after week. If you'd like to find out how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash T-M-R-O slash join. For those of you waiting for our next live show, we're tentatively planning on one January 25th or 26th. It'll be with Karrion and myself, the first official live show of 2020. We're really excited for it. Now the day job might force us to slide it to the left or right a little bit. So make sure you're subscribed to YouTube so you get that notification in your YouTube stream. It makes all of the difference. I'd like to thank everyone so much for watching. We'll see you next week. And also a first for a U.S. built the Skase Casco. A Skase Casco, everyone. Remember, they're no longer space capsules. They're Skase Cascals.