 SpaceX's Florida Starship Tower is nearly complete, China's space station is lacking collaboration, two satellites past each other six metres apart and much more is coming up in Monday's tomorrow's Space News. Another vehicle is saying goodbye at Starbase as Ship 22's aft section has been cut off and rolled away. As you may have seen by now, younger sibling S24 has returned to the production site for the final preparations before the orbital flight test. The ship was actually placed in the rocket garden, which is traditionally the final resting place of redundant ships and boosters, however it seems as if S24 was left here because of the lack of space in the main production site courtyard. Crews have still been working on S24 with the crane attachment points on the nose cone being removed. Presumably, SpaceX will send a couple people and a few starbrick tiles up on a cherry picker to patch up the gaps. Ship 25 and Booster 7 are the only two vehicles currently at the launch site and one of them could be receiving this Raptor 2 engine. If this is for the Super Heavy Booster, that would be especially interesting considering its next goal is to conduct a static fire of all 33 engines. The Starship launch site at the Kennedy Space Centre has been getting the equipment that allows it to be a landing site as well, the chopsticks. Following the carriage, the chopstick arms were rolled out to launch Complex 39A from SpaceX's Roberts Road production site. The design has been refined from the Boca Chica orbital pad version as the arms are shorter and more compact. In the sunlight, the chopsticks were installed onto the carriage which was being propped up adjacent to the tower before the entire assembly was lifted by SpaceX's massive Libre crane. Now, don't expect these to be used in a landing environment anytime soon. SpaceX is yet to launch a full stacked orbit, let alone water land a Super Heavy Booster. The art of catching the biggest first stage ever manufactured from the upper atmosphere must be perfected at the test site first before the risk can be taken to try and land at the most historic launch pad in human history. The chopsticks serve a secondary purpose though, which is as a crane to lift vehicles from the ground onto the launch mount and it's been proven at Starbase that a chopstick lift is much faster than a traditional crane lift. China's Tiangong space station is the newest permanently inhabited place in space, being only the second station to hold that title following the ISS. So far, all missions to Tiangong have been from China, however the Tiangacore module where all of the crewed and cargo missions to the station dock is compliant with the international docking system standard which is used by all of the modern crew spacecraft you'd be familiar with such as SpaceX's Dragon 2, Boeing's Starliner and Sierra Space's Dream Chaser. So theoretically, international collaboration would be feasible, right? Well not anymore for the European Space Agency, at least. The Director General of ESA, Yosif Ashbaha has said that ESA is too occupied with keeping their ISS commitments to find the financial and political will to also engage with Tiangong. This is a turning direction for ESA as previously they've been working with China to potentially send European astronauts alongside Chinese Tyconauts to the orbiting laboratory. For example, six years ago in 2017, Samantha Christopheretti of Italy and Matthias Marra of Germany both visited China for sea survival training and language learning. If you remove the politics from the equation, I think having the ability to visit more stations in space would be awesome as it expands the ability to perform more science. However, removing politics is never going to happen and it seems like the political differences between the West and China is going to make potential collaboration a lot more difficult. But it's also important to consider that Tiangong isn't the only new station coming online over the next few years. Gateway is the NASA-led lunar space station project for the Artemis missions. There's also the Axiom station, which is going to begin its life as an addition to the ISS. And then there's the Blue Origin-led orbital reef project. So it's not like we're going to enter a space station shortage any time soon. It'd be a lot easier for ESA to collaborate on these future commercial ventures, so maybe that's something they'll be working towards. I'm interested to hear your perspective on this story, so make sure to leave your thoughts and comments down below. Space debris is a big problem, which is ironic, because a lot of the debris flying around Earth at thousands of miles an hour are teeny tiny bolts and flicks of paint from old decommissioned spacecraft and satellites. Some examples, though, are full satellites which have run out of propellant and are dead weight orbiting Earth. Two examples are a spent Soviet Cosmos 3M upper stage, which launched in 1986 and a Parastata relay satellite, which was also launched by a Cosmos 3M in 1998. According to Leogabs, these two objects passed each other, travelling in perpendicular directions at a distance of six metres. The margin of error, however, is tens of metres, so do keep that in mind. What you're looking at right now is a visualisation by Jonathan McDowell of the actual size and distance of the satellites to scale. Both of these objects have continued on their near polar orbits, which could have been a massive issue if they had collided. A polar orbit covers all of the possible inclination, so having thousands of little pieces of debris spreading out through this area would be a massive headache for anyone wanting to launch anything to 950 to 1050 kilometres, which is already one of the worst regions for space debris. The past point was 986 kilometres over Antarctica, which being at the bottom of the planet is the hotspot for where polar orbits cross paths. A very bad coincidence of two derelict large objects in the same place at the same time could be a catastrophic pain to work around as one collision can create thousands of pieces of debris, which can all themselves cause more collisions, creating more debris, and I think you get the point. This near miss that is very much too close for comfort is yet another reminder that we need to be acting on the space debris problem, as our planet is surrounded by now useless junk launched over the last few decades. There are many projects currently being developed, but this is a massive problem that will take a long time to solve. It's also a message to the aerospace companies launching vehicles that they need to be safely deorbitating their rocket stage in the near future, and they need to be deorbitating their rocket stages once their purpose has been fulfilled. This week has been another relatively quiet one compared to some of the cadence we had last year, and we're starting it off in Wallops, Virginia, with Rocket Lab's maiden flight out of the United States. At 2300 universal time on Monday, the 24th of January, all nine Rutherford engines on the first stage of Electron ignited, producing 216 kN of thrust, costing the 18.5m to a rocket into space. After the first stage had depleted all of its fuel, it fell away and ended its life in the Atlantic Ocean, as this was not a recoverable electron flight. The second stage, with a photon kick stage and the three satellites from Hawkeye 360, continued up to orbit with a successful insertion and separation. Following the final push from the kick stage, the three payloads were deployed into their 550km, 40.5 degree low Earth orbit. Rocket Lab will sure be happy with this fantastic start to the year, and hopefully they'll be able to stick the helicopter recovery on their test return flights out of here. Next up, we're heading to Japan, as it's 0149 UTC on Thursday, Mitsubishi were launching IGS Radar 7, a radar reconnaissance satellite for the Japanese government, from launch area Y1 at the Tanegashima Space Center. This mission was performed with a H2A rocket in the 202 configuration, meaning it had two large solid rocket roosters strapped onto the side. Due to this mission being from the Japanese intelligence agency, not a lot is known, but it has been confirmed that the payload was successfully deployed into a sun-synchronous orbit. It's time for more styling satellites, with 56 being launched as the Group 5-2 mission. This flight also commenced on Thursday at 0932 Universal, from Slick 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The second flight of Group 5, this new batch of small styling V2 testbeds were delivered to an initial 212 x 338 kilometer 43-degree orbit, paving the way for the full deployment of the Falcon Scale V2 constellation, which is beginning in February. As you may know, Starlink V2 is designed for launching on Starship as the satellites are physically much larger than their V1.5 counterparts. However, as you might have noticed, Starship isn't launching to orbit regularly yet, so smaller versions were developed for launching on Falcon 9. The payload of this mission also helped the Falcon 9 claim a new record, with all of the satellites and the dispenser adding up to a total mass of 17.4 metric tons, the most payload ever carried to orbit by a Falcon 9. The booster supporting this mission, B1067, concluded its ninth flight by softly landing on the drone ship, just read the instructions, which is positioned at about 660 kilometers downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. The fairings were also recovered by support ship Bob. Editing Ryan Hears, of course, SpaceX was added to change up their entire schedule just as I'd finished recording. Anyways, tomorrow Tuesday the 31st, Starlink Group 2 No. 6 will be lifting off from Vandenberg, Group 5 3 will be lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center the following day, on Wednesday, Amazonas Nexus could be launching on Sunday from Cape Canaveral, but we definitely know that a Proton-M with Electro-L No. 4 will be lifting off on Sunday for Kazakhstan's first launch of the year. 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Hopefully we'll see you then, but for now, thank you for watching and goodbye.