 Hello citizens of Earth and welcome back to Tomorrow News. There's a bit to catch up on since the start of December and for that reason I'm only going to really be skimming the highlight which includes a SpaceX update, two new private astronauts, some astronaut wing news, Astra's next launch attempt and space traffic. So stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News which is the week of December 15th 2021. The first story of this week's SpaceX update is also combined with Roscosmos as they have selected their first cosmonaut to fly on a commercial vehicle in the autumn of 2022. Now they haven't said it's Crew Dragon or the Crew 5 mission technically but Crew 5 and Russia have been linked before and if it took Russia over a year between Dragon's first human flight and being happy with it, I don't think it'll be Starliner. The cosmonaut who has been selected is 37 year old Anna Kikiner of Novice Burst Russia. She was originally assigned to the Soyuz MS-22 mission which is scheduled for September next year but now that Roscosmos and NASA have agreed on the switcheroo that seat will be going to someone of NASA's choosing. Kikiner is also currently the only active female in Russia's cosmonaut corps. We've seen some interesting photos come out of the Kennedy Space Center over the last few days and it sparked some interesting conversation. SpaceX have converted boosters before with both B1023 and B1025 being converted from a Falcon 9 full thrust booster to a Falcon side booster but this image is of B1052 which started life as a Falcon heavy side booster and has now been converted to a Falcon 9 booster, the first booster that has been converted in that direction. It's also the first conversion of the Block 5 generation. In this photo the second stage has also been made to the top of the interstage and no grid fins are attached. We don't know what mission this booster will be used for yet as it's still going through refurbishment. According to Elon Musk, SpaceX are now going to be starting up a program which will work on taking carbon dioxide out of the Earth's atmosphere and turning it into rocket fuel. The learnings from this will be important to apply on Mars as sadly the ground infrastructure on the red planet is currently slightly lacking behind that of Earth. As I said in the intro, I'm not going to be able to go into every little detail of what's been happening down in Starbase because of the two gap between the last episode and this episode as there's literally hours upon hours of footage to uncover but what I can do is show you the highlights of a pretty exciting fortnight. Booster 5 has been waiting very patiently in the highway for a while now as it has been being constructed and finally a week ago it got it's time to shine in the Texan sun which soon went away as the weather candid over. Taking a turn onto Highway 4, the booster trundled down the road for a little while taking it's time just to ensure that it doesn't get damaged on its travels and it then took a turn into the propellant production site where it parked up to stand alongside SN15 and S16. Following this move for B5, the Booster 6 test tank was moved inside of the high bay. Another very exciting thing that happened in Starbase was the moving and lifting of Booster 4 which was picked up by the SpaceX branded LR11000 and is now sitting on the orbital launch mount. It isn't just rocket part news though as a prefabricated part of the new wide bay has been lifted up and installed onto the pre-existing structure and with that all the highlighted updates from Starbase have been covered. The man behind the dear moon mission, Yusaku Mayozawa, is testing the waters of space before they fly themselves and some other artists out to the moon and back. Soyuz MS-20 has a crew of himself, video producer Yosha Horano as well as Roscosmos Cosmonauts and commander Alexander Misakhin and they will all spend a planned 12 days aboard the International Space Station. The Soyuz 2.1A rocket launched at 0738 UTC on December 8th from launch complex 31-6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On the journey up to the station, Yusaku seemed to be very amazed by the environment of space, treating this message as well as many others and posting this fantastic photo of the station's solar rays. Photos taken from space on an iPhone just somehow make the entire experience for us seem so much more real. He's also been enjoying his time up on the ISS with this video being published of him testing out the toilet and showing us how it works. I'll link his channel below so you can keep up to date with his travels and if you don't understand Japanese, all of the videos are subtitled in English. Blue Origin were the host of six people on December 11th who were taken on a ride up to the edge of space as a part of the NS-19 mission. The most notable crew member in my opinion was Laura Shepherd Churchley, the eldest daughter of Alan Shepherd, whom the vehicle is named after. The flight came just one day after the Federal Aviation Authority or FAA announced that it is going to be ending as practice of awarding people who flew on commercial vehicles astronaut wings on December 31st this year, but those who will fly before them, including the NS-19 crew, will be awarded. There is no distance cap or training cap or anything like that. All that matters is whether or not you flew on an FAA licensed commercial vehicle. Most companies already have their own astronaut wings which they will hand out to those who have flown on their vehicles. It's just now the FAA won't be awarding them either. In my opinion, if you have had to complete extensive training to fly on a vehicle, such as the crew of Inspiration 4, then you should be awarded with wings, but just not giving them to anyone is probably the simplest solution. Don't worry though, even if you fly next year and you don't get your wings from the FAA, they will list your name on this web page which is easily accessible at faa.gov forward slash space forward slash licenses forward slash human underscore space right forward slash recognition. It really rolls off the tongue. It's exciting news from Astra as just about half a month after they successfully reached orbit, the company announced that their next launch won't be from Kodiak Alaska. It'll be from the most famous launching location of them all, Cape Canaveral. Space Launch Complex 46 is currently expected to be the host of 12 launches a year for Astra over two years which averages out to one launch a month until the end of 2023. The first launch is going to be a set of five Cube Sats for NASA's venture class large services program, four of which are from three different universities and the last is from the Johnson Space Center. Slick 46 is in a range of vehicles before starting off with tests of the Trident 2 SLBM, Athena 1 and 2, Minotaur 4 and the most recent launch, which is what you're looking at, was the Ascenta Bought 2 back in 2019. This was an Orion test capsule on top of a modified Minotaur 4 first stage. Quickly before we get into space traffic, James Webb has been delayed again by two days to December 24th as NASA teams need to sort out a communications issue between the telescope and the Ariane 5. Right then, space traffic time. The first launch to cover this week is the third launch of Group 4 of SpaceX's Starlink Constellation, which lifted off from Slick 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2312 UTC on December 2. On board with 48 Starlink satellites, which are all going to eventually end up at a 540km orbit with an inclination of about 53.22 degrees. About eight minutes after lift off, Booster B1060 successfully landed 620km downrange on a shortfall of Gravitas. Lifting off at OO19 UTC on the 5th of December from EAS in Kuru, French Guyana, this new STB free-gap rocket started the journeys of two Galileo satellites, which will finally end up at around 23,222km in altitude. Gagageo is the European's version of GPS. Next up is this launch of a Ceres-1 from China, which is from the private firm Galactic Energy. Lifting off from the Site-95 at the G-Quant Satellite Launch Center, the rocket had on board the third Golden Bohemia-1 payload, which it has taken to an unknown low-Earth orbit. Select 41 in Cape Canaveral at 10.19 on December 7th, though STP-3 launched atop an Atlas 5551, meaning it had a 5.4m-faring five solid rocket boosters and one Centaur engine on the upper stage. On board was both an STP satellite and a few more wide-chair customers, which were all heading for a geosynchronous orbit. After the Atlas-5 flight, Soyuz MS-20 launched with Yosuke Miyazawa, but as we've already covered that one, were the skippings straight to New Zealand from the launch of a data with Destiny. Rocket Labs Electron left Launch Complex 1A on the Mahia Peninsula at two minutes past midnight Coordinated Universal Time on December 9th. On board were two 60kg Black Sky satellites, which are used to image events on the ground with sub-meter accuracy. Both satellites are aiming for a 430km 42° inclination low-Earth orbit. The next launch is the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, also known as XP, which lifted off from Launch Complex 39.8 at 0600 UTC on December 9th. B1061 successfully did its job and came in for a smooth landing on Just Read the Instructions for SpaceX's 97th successful booster landing. They have three more missions scheduled this year, so I hope it'll become 100 before 2022, but there could always be delays. It's the space traffic segment that keeps on giving as we're going back to China for this launch of the Long March 4B, which was a big milestone launch as it was the 400th launch of a rocket, which is a member of the Long March family. The achievement was reached at 011 UTC on December 10th at site 9401 at the G-Quantz satellite launch centre. On board was the fifth payload of the Shijian 6 network. For only the second time in 2021, we got to see the launch of a Proton-M, which lifted off from Launch Complex 239 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1207 UTC on December 13th. On board the rocket were two express communication satellites Amu-3 and Amu-7, which are headed for a geostationary orbit. The final launch to cover is the second launch of Tianglian-2, which occurred at 1609 Coordinated Universal Time on December 13th with this Long March 3. Lifting off from Launch Complex 3 at the Zhichang satellite launch centre in China, the payload is reportedly healthy and in its desired orbit. Coming up over the next seven days, we have Launch 3 of Style Group 2, Turks at 5, BCRS 24, a H2804 launch, Virgin Orbits above the clouds, a Long March 7A, and the first flight of an Angara A5 Peerzy. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tammathaskov. A change is coming as space weather activity finally picks up this week. As we take a look at our earth-facing disk, you can see the right half of the sun that's the western side really has not much going on. In fact, we had actually dropped to a spotless sun for a few days, so things were extremely quiet. But as you take a look at the left hand side, that's the eastern side of the sun. Look at that! One, two, three active regions, maybe a fourth and more who are rotating into earth view as we speak. We are boosting that solar flux. We're coming up into the 90s again. And in fact, we actually have a 5% chance of M-class flares right now, and that risk may be growing. So this means radio blackouts could definitely be on the menu. As we switch to our far-sided sun, and this is Stereo A, and it's looking at the sun just a little bit from the side, you can see all those active regions plus a whole lot more that are forming and gurgling and burglaring on the sun's far side. These have yet to rotate into earth view. And you can see from the glow on the East Lemon Stereo's view that yes, there are even more active regions that are on their way. So definitely expect the M-class flare risk to boost that solar flux to continue boosting, which means marginal radio propagation is going to go to good radio propagation on earth day side. And then the radio blackout risk could mean issues for GPS, but it also could mean issues for radio comms for launches and for space traffic. For more details on this week's Space Weather, including how these new active regions could affect you, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. If you want to get access to some cool perks alongside the tomorrow news and tomorrow live episodes you've already received, then you can support us financially by becoming a citizen of tomorrow by clicking the join button below. Escape Velocity citizens get access to the exclusive Escape Velocity channel in our Discord server, which is open to everyone by the way. Orbital citizens get to vote on tomorrow live topics there as well, and suborbital and ground support citizens get exclusive access to the pre and post show live streams of the tomorrow live show. If you don't feel like supporting us financially, that's completely fine. You can support us for free another way, such as making that red subscribe button turn grey, pressing the notification bells and liking the videos and all of that jazz. There's not going to be a tomorrow live this week. There could be one next week on Christmas Eve. We'll just have to wait and see how that pans out, and there should also be a tomorrow news episode coming within the next few days, so stay tuned for that. Thank you so much for watching today. Hopefully we'll see you then. Goodbye.