 Week 2 of 2022 saw some interesting action, especially with the catch-arm tests down at Starbase, the announcement of a certain virtual assistant flying on Artemis 1, data on Russia's latest launch failure and a bunch more stuff. So stay tuned, as this is your episode of Tomorrow News, which is for the week of January 11th, 2022. Over the last two days, teams down at Starbase have been testing at the arms on the orbital launch tower, with the arms rotating out and the whole structure being moved up and down the tower for the first time. There isn't really too much to comment on here, apart from the fact that this is one of the craziest pieces of engineering I've ever seen, and it's probably the craziest piece to ever be attached to a launch pad. The idea that SpaceX are going to actually catch a rocket in mid-air is mind-boggling. A bar has been lifted up and hooked onto both arms, connecting them together, possibly to prevent them swinging apart in the wind whilst they are not in use in the event that a failure takes place that would allow them to do just that, or it could also be used for load tests to see if the structure can reliably hold the weight of a super heavy booster. I hope it does, because if it can't, then the entire thing may just fall off. The arms were then lifted up together with the bar still connected as they slowly made their way up to the top of the orbital launch mount and then rotated a bit just to make sure they were still working. Egon tweeted this drone footage of the arms at their maximum height, which increases the coolness factor of the machine even more. It's crazy to think that just a couple years ago, this entire sight looked pretty much like the landscape in the background now. The quick disconnect arm has also been going through some movement tests of its own as eventually it will swing out the way during the launch of Starship after fueling it up. Some white cushion pads have also been added to the parts of the arm which will actually touch the ship so the stainless steel doesn't get damaged. It's the end of the road for booster 3 as late at night the SpaceX branded LR11000 crane was hooked up to the top of the super heavy booster ready to lift it as the liquid oxygen tank has been getting chopped up to make it slightly easier to scrap. After this initial cut, every other ring section was then separated as well. The wide bay is now expanding up to its third level with the first prefabricated part, this corner piece being installed onto the building. It seems like for whatever reason, once SpaceX were finished with test tank SN2 in early 2020 they kind of just forgot about it and left it where it was but finally they have decided to have a little tidy up so SN2 has been moved out of the way of the wide bay. Sanjay Bhagavad became Starix country director and chairman of the board in India on October 1st last year but on January 4th they posted to their linked in account saying that they have stepped down from the role for personal reasons and that their last working day was December 31st. On November 26th India's Ministry of Communications issued a statement telling SpaceX to stop booking up Starix services with immediate effect because SpaceX didn't have a license to operate in the country. In the days that followed the Starix website was still allowing pre-orders of 99 US dollars of pop but it now says Starix is not yet available in your area due to pending regulatory approval. As we receive approvals our coverage area will continue to expand so please check back in the future for availability in your area. It has also been reported that SpaceX have emailed pre-order customers in India saying that their deposits would be refunded until Starix is licensed to operate there. Last month Bhagavad said on their linked in page that we as in Starix hope to have applied for a commercial license on or before 31st of January 2022 unless we hit some major roadblock. I don't know if this date is still the target because if it isn't then potential customers in India are going to have to wait even longer to purchase their Starix equipment. 15 launches in 2021 made it Ariane Space's busiest year since 2000 with them only launching one less rocket in 2021 than the final year of the 20th century. 2022 however could break that 16 launch record as the company currently has a minimum of 17 launches slated out of French Guyana and Baikonur. One of the most exciting launches from Ariane Space in 2022 will be the debut flight of their next generation Ariane vehicle Ariane 6 which features new P120C solid rocket boosters, an upgraded Vulcan 2.1 engine and two new variants. The core and upper stages are currently on their way to Kuro for combined tests on the launch pad which are scheduled to start in April. CEO Stefan Israel is confident that the Ariane 6 will launch in the second half of this year saying to press briefing on January 6th that very important milestones are now behind us and this is why we are confident in making this maiden flight this year. There isn't really going to be that much of a transition period between Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 unlike with Ariane 5 and Ariane 4. Only five more launches are scheduled with Ariane 5, the final of which will be ESA's juice mission which stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer in the first half of 2023. That year we'll see three total launches of the Ariane 6 which will increase to 18 2024 which will then increase to a range of 10 to 12 launches in 2025. Ariane Space is also making another new vehicle in the form of Vega C which is an upgraded version of the Vega small launch vehicle. The first launch of this new version which features a single P120C solid rocket motor as the first stage and the ability to deliver over two metric tons to a 700 kilometer polar orbit is scheduled for Q2 this year. Final vehicle that Ariane Space operates, the Soyuz, has an uncertain future with launching out of French Guyana as Israel has said that the Ariane 6 and Vega C should be able to take over what the Soyuz can do. If they do stop operating the Soyuz after 2023 then that would free up a pad which could be used for another vehicle and that decision is expected to be made by the end of the year. European institutional customers will likely move over to other vehicles however quote regarding commercial missions it is a bit too early to say what exactly the market will be. A good enough business case to keep Soyuz online in Kuro would be a minimum of two or three launches per year and the possibility of the rocket offering a backup launch service in case Ariane or Vega go offline. I said in the space traffic segment last week that the test flight of the Angara A5 with the PISI upper stage had failed but at that time we did not have any information on what had actually happened to the rocket. Data from the US Space Force has now revealed that the stage re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at 2108 UTC on January 6th. The stage was planned to reach geostationary orbit but it malfunctioned during the second burn which left the second stage in a transfer orbit which decayed over the subsequent nine days. The first two flights of the Angara A5 used a Breeze M upper stage with the new PISI stage being based on the Block DM-03 stage which is used on the Proton the predecessor to Angara. Another one of the most anticipated flights this year will be the inaugural flight of the launch system taking the Orion spacecraft to the Pacific Ocean from Cape Canaveral the long way around via lunar orbit. It's just been announced by Lockheed Martin that the technology in the back end of a certain popular virtual assistant is going to be used within a test payload to experiment how voice recognition technology could be used to assist astronauts on future missions. Amazon Cisco and Lockheed Martin have all been collaborating on a project called Calisto which is a demonstration to see how Amazon's Alexa technology and Cisco's Webex teleconferencing platform could be used to help out the crew of future missions. Astronauts would be able to use voice commands to access data, adjust spacecraft controls, control interior lighting, control displays, start diagnostic tests and interact with the teams back on the ground supporting the mission. According to Rob Chambers the director of commercial civil space strategy at Lockheed Martin one way you'll be able to do this with the Calisto payload is to say Alexa what is the average temperature across all the batteries and what is the peak temperature and it will perform that data processing for you. The integration of the Webex and Alexa technology will also apparently make it easier to collaborate with the teams on the ground than it currently is. Calisto uses the same technology that is available to anyone right now such as what's packed inside this echo dot but it obviously will have its own commands for Orion specific systems that can be all processed locally but if it gets confused then any query can be transmitted to the ground. Calisto has been tested significantly in simulators and the company is involved a confident that it is ready to fly on Artemis One. The next question to ask is how will this actually work if no one will be on board Artemis One and the answer to that is quote unquote virtual crew members who will be in a back room of mission control issuing commands with cameras inside Orion monitoring what's happening. The cost of Calisto has been funded by the companies developing it with Lockheed Martin signing a reimbursable space axe agreement with NASA in 2018 to support testing and inclusion of the technology on Artemis One. Back then of course the mission was supposed to launch in June of 2020 and we all know how that went. There are currently no plans for Calisto to be used on the subsequent Artemis or other crew missions as this will just be a test payload. If it's valuable we could be seeing Alexa on Gateway at habitats in Rovers and in many more situations. Just before we get into some space traffic Astra's 8th launch vehicle has just gone vertical at the Cape for the first time at Slick 46 and if you look very closely you can see the NASA Meeple on the ferry. It is quite funny to see all the infrastructure towering around the vehicle as the entire rocket stack is basically the same size as the rods on top of the lightning towers. If you're curious why Astra are using Slick 46 and not LC48 then my best guess is because it looks pretty empty in this photo but I am no expert so I could be wrong. It's a short space traffic segment this week with just one launch to cover which was the launch of Starlink Group 4 Mission 5 the third year in a row where SpaceX were the first launch of the year. Lifting off at 2149 coordinated universal time on January 6th the 5th mission to the 4th Starlink Shell went off without a hitch with B1062 lifting out of launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A short follow of gravity task was awaiting the booster 620km downrange with the ferrings being retrieved by Doug a further 45km downrange. All 49 satellites inside the ferry are raising themselves up to their 520km 53.22 degree inclination orbits. Coming up over the next 7 days we have above the clouds on Launcher 1 the Transporter 3 rideshare flight and the flight of Astra's LV0008 rocket. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tamatha Scove. Activity on the sun sure is picking up this week as we take a look at our earth-facing disc you can see that coronal hole that finger-like coronal hole that's rotating in through the earth strike zone this thing has been sending us some fast solar wind over the past day and because of that sharp boundary there it sure bumped us up to storm levels pretty quickly in fact it should keep us at active to maybe even storm levels over the next 24 hours before things begin to calm down and it could bring a skosh of aurora down to mid-latitudes but you're going to have to be pretty quick to catch it. Meanwhile we also see on the east limb a lot of new bright regions are rotating into earth view in fact down in the south the main players are region 29 or 2924 and 25 but we have a whole host of other regions that are going to be rotating into earth view within the next few days as a matter of fact within the week we could possibly have up to about 10 new active regions on the earth-facing disc if you can believe that. And now for your Martian Minute. It's been a while since we checked in at the Red Planet and it's beginning to be dust storm season in the southern hemisphere. In fact as we take a look at the dust maps from the thymus imagery aboard Mars Odyssey we see back in late November we did see some local dust-ups near Jezero crater and up toward Utopia but those didn't last all that long and they didn't really bother a Perseverance rover or Ingenuity helicopter but as we begin to move into December we do welcome back the Marcy instrument. This is a full planetary imager aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and we're so happy to have this instrument back because as you can see we have full imagery all over again it's just wonderful both north and and southern hemisphere so I couldn't be more pleased. And as you take a look in the beginning of December you can see that Aphelion cloud belt beginning to diminish this is due to the southern hemisphere dust storms beginning to pick up you're going to see that equatorial cloud belt begin to kind of dissipate over time. In fact as we take a look at Olympus Mons and Tharsus Montes you can see those big plumes sitting over these mountains watch those plumes diminish day by day by day and that is due to those dust storms in the southern hemisphere picking up and that's all in the eastern hemisphere but as we get to mid December you can see there's dust storms that are continuing in the south near Solis that move east toward Valis Marineris and that kind of calms down a little bit but as we move to the western hemisphere and this is where all our Martian colonists are we do see some regional dust storms in Promethea Terra that move east into Serenium Terra near the end of 2021 and they actually begin to move north into Hesperia which is just below Gale Crater where Curiosity rover is but believe it or not in the north it's actually the northern summer and everything is beautiful we're having both an Elysium Planitia and in Gale Crater have been nice blue sunny skies and luckily also in Jezero Crater where Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopters sit it's actually a balmy minus six degrees Celsius and the low is minus 78 before we wrap up the show thank you to all the citizens of tomorrow who contribute financially to the show every month your donations assessed with keeping the shows at a high quality and keeping station 204 on orbit for the live shows if you wish to join the escape velocity orbital sub orbital or go around to port citizens and experience some of the cool perks for yourself such as access to space new scripts as they're being written and access to the pre and post shows of the tomorrow live broadcasts and head over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join or just press the join button which is next to the subscribe button if you are yet to click that red subscribe button then we would very much appreciate it if you did as the more we can feed the algorithm the more it rewards us in recommending our work to more people on the internet our free discord server can be found at the link in the description below as well all the data that has gone into this week's episode if you feel like doing some further reading thank you so much for watching you can catch us on friday for the live show and goodbye