 Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new edition of Tomorrow News. We've got launches, we've got Starship data and we've got some seat purchases to talk about. We've got commercial contracts and we've got weather. So if you'd like to see all that and more in the future from us, make sure to hit that subscribe button and ring the bell for some notifications so you don't miss the next episode of news or when we next go live. So sit back and react as this is your Tomorrow News for the week of February 14th, 2021. Starting off with SpaceX and some good news, according to the company themselves, there are now more than 10,000 styling users pointing dishes at the sky to get some rather quick internet. As you can probably tell, I really want to be a part of that 10,000 but I guess this is good practice of patience and to try and not be too jealous. We've got some data off the back of SN9's flight with a lot of questions circulating around the Raptor relight just before landing. Mad Overlord put this to Elon on Twitter proposing the idea to fire all three Raptors and shutting down at least one unhelpful one, assuming that they are all working. In response, Musk simply stated that we were too dumb. Lighting all three engines first and then shutting down the least efficient one is probably the best chance that SpaceX actually has at sticking a landing earlier until more development has happened with the Raptor engine and the fueling to allow a higher probability of a relight. SpaceX have also revealed that two more dedicated rideshare missions are planned for the year being adequately called Transporter 2 and Transporter 3. The customer base for SpaceX's small sack launches is also growing, which is probably the last thing Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Firefly are wanting to hear right now. Approximately three years ago, this absolute beast launched out of LC39A. We all know it. It is Falcon Heavy, the current most powerful rocket on the face of the Earth. Well, NASA have just forked over $331 million over to SpaceX to launch the first two pieces of Gateway on it. For comparison, the Psyche Asteroid Pro being launched in 2022 cost NASA just a third of this contract's price tag. Now, the reason this is costing a lot more than the figures available on the Internet for a Falcon Heavy launch is because SpaceX are actually having to modify the rocket to be able to carry the power and propulsion element, PPE for short, and the Habitation and Logistics Act post, which is Halo for short, that are being launched on the mission. Just in case you don't know what the PPE and Halo are, these are the two sections docked together. It is essentially a box with a cylinder, with two giant solar panels, and an absolute ton of antennas. If some of the doubters were still doubting that NASA going with these commercial partners wasn't going to end well, well, with just SpaceX alone, they are now entrusting them with half of their space station, which is needed for Artemis, getting people from their space station to the moon with Runa Starship, which is also needed for Artemis, and they're using Dragon XL atop a Falcon Heavy to deliver cargo to Gateway. Would you guessed it, it's also needed for the Artemis program to work out a mission. You know, is SNS now just going to be used for humans? Excellent question to ask, Ryan. A bit of a one-two punch seems to be forming up in the world of the space launch system that may end up seeing it only flying meat. Europa Clipper is NASA's upcoming mission to the watery Jovian moon that may be one of the best places as a safe harbor for life in our solar system. For the entirety of its existence, Europa Clipper has been budgetarily assigned the space launch system as its vehicle, providing a direct ascent trajectory from Earth to Jupiter in three years, but at the expense of flying on SLS, which is not cheap, nor a frequent flyer with a projected maximum rate of two launches per year. And that is written literally into NASA's budget. Europa Clipper has to launch on a space launch system rocket. And budget in the United States is law, so NASA is beholden to it. They have to follow that. And that can change. And guess what? It did. In the fiscal year 2021 budget, there's a little bit of leeway now. Enacted in December, the new funding bill will, for the first time, allow NASA to seriously look at alternatives for the use of the space launch system as Europa Clipper's set in stone launch vehicle. And NASA took the appropriations and ran with it. NASA did hold an ace in the hole by asking the Europa Clipper team to develop the spacecraft with an ability to launch on SLS or a commercial launch vehicle. But building a spacecraft capable of handling two completely different launch environments is incredibly expensive. You'll often see it argued in the comments section that a spacecraft should just be pulled off of, say, the space launch system and stuck atop a Falcon 9 or an Atlas 5. And that's not how engineering works, unfortunately. In this case, designing for two completely different vehicles, it's almost like designing two completely different spacecraft. It's a bit of a drag on your budget. And in an expensive project like Europa Clipper, that's not a very good thing. And it is not great in the long run for you actually being able to sustain your mission. But building for two launch vehicles, that is not the only problem Europa Clipper has had. The space launch system, it uses two massive solid rocket boosters during the opening stages of Ascent that are derived from the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters. And if you've ever watched cockpit footage from a shuttle launch, you'll know when the boosters light, such as now. And it's not a smooth ride whatsoever. Look at all that shaking that's happening there. Now, that shaking actually caused compatibility issues with the design of Europa Clipper. And those were publicly disclosed last year. So you can imagine Europa Clipper riding on an SLS, shaking the pieces. Not a good thing to happen. But the fiscal year 2021 appropriations bill gave NASA full discretion to see if a commercial launcher could be a viable option for Europa Clipper. And NASA wasted no time in doing so. At the end of January, a mere timeframe of several weeks later, NASA issued a solicitation for commercial launch services for Europa Clipper. That is a contractual equivalent of a breakup letter with SLS as the launch vehicle. And as you can imagine, all eyes are on Falcon Heavy for that bid. And that's mostly because Falcon Heavy is likely to be the only certified launch vehicle at the time that the bid will be occurring. This is pure speculation on my part, but I think we're likely going to see a fully expendable Falcon Heavy to get the maximum amount of lift and throw capability. And in addition, some form of a solid third stage to give Europa Clipper some extra kick. Now, with the space launch systems lift and throw capability, Europa Clipper would have done that direct ascent to Jupiter, taking just a handful of years to get there. But with a less powerful vehicle like Falcon Heavy, even with a solid third stage, it's going to take a trip through the inner solar system on a mega trajectory. And that is using two gravitational assists, one at Earth and another at Mars, to gain the energy to reach a trajectory to intercept the Jovian system. The launch of Europa Clipper is currently scheduled now for some time around October of 2024, with a arrival at Jupiter and Europa occurring in 2030. Now, yes, that six years of operation from Earth to the Jovian system does add on some budgetary need for the operations of Europa Clipper, but it is a drop in the bucket when you look at the cost savings by moving away from the space launch system and going to a commercial launcher, which I kid you not, NASA has said in their own analysis that it would save $1.5 billion. Billion with a B saved just because they're not going to fly on the space launch system. That is absurd to think about that. Now, in addition, NASA is going to want all of the space launch system rockets that they can have because at a flight rate of about two per year, that's not exactly going to be helpful for the Artemis program. So now that they're not going to be sticking Europa Clipper on top of a space launch system rocket, well, they've got that extra rocket that they need for 2024, at least some time around them. Now, that second part of that one-two punch that's happening to the space launch system this week is that one of its biggest advocates is calling it a career and retiring. Senator Richard Shelby has been involved in the Congress of the United States since 1978, where he originally served four two-year terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives for his district in Alabama. And in 1986, he campaigned and successfully won one of the two Senate seats for Alabama and has stayed since. With Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state, Senator Shelby was a steadfast advocate for a multitude of NASA programs, including the space launch system. And he was also a noted critic of NASA's commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. Election for his seat will occur in 2022. So even with one of its biggest advocates leaving the room, the space launch system is going to continue on and be a part of NASA's Artemis program. Speaking of that, NASA has said that they are now getting ready to perform their second green run test of the Artemis 1 core stage before the end of February. So keep your eyes open for that. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing those four RS-25s light up again. Tasty, tasty, tasty mock diamonds. Now, I want to switch gears a little bit here, because I want to talk about a place that the space launch system may actually send a payload to one day, Mars, because we had two arrivals this week and two new countries joining the Mars Club. On February 9th, the United Arab Emirates was the first to arrive with their orbiter mission, Hope. Hope is now in a preliminary orbit which will be changed to the final planned science orbit, with a peri-arean of 20,000 kilometers and an apo-arean of 43,000 kilometers. If that orbit sounds high to you, it's because it is. Other missions like NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter are somewhere in the order of 300 to 400 kilometers above the surface. But the United Arab Emirates Hope is doing something that no mission has actually looked at as a whole at Mars before. Weather. Yes, the atmospheric conditions of Mars have been studied from low altitude orbits, but that's a dataset that explains what's occurring in a small area during a brief amount of time. Hope, at its orbital altitude, will be looking at Mars as a whole with its three instruments, a multi-band high-resolution camera called the Emirates Exploration Imager that can measure the quantity and types of water, ice, dust and gases in the atmosphere of Mars, the Emirates Infrared Spectrometer which will look at the lower and middle atmosphere of Mars and the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer which will examine the upper atmosphere. Hope has rightfully been described as a weather satellite for Mars because that's the mission goal. Study the seasonal weather and climactic changes on Mars, which amazingly, in multiple decades of exploration, no one has done. The United Arab Emirates is now the fifth member of the Mars Club. So congratulations to them and everyone at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center. It's so exciting to have hope and orbit and it's going to be gathering that data of the weather and it's going to tell us what it's like of Mars. It's just I'm very excited to see that dataset once it starts coming down. And another thing to be excited about was that the next day, the very next day, like excitement just like went up and it stayed there, China attempted to become the sixth member of the Mars Club. Tiananmen 1 is an operation that I would consider a bit of a super mission. We've got an orbiter that has a high resolution imager for surface studies in determining the composition of Mars' surface atmosphere and radar to hunt for subsurface ice, a system to probe the ionosphere and sweeping through Mars' magnetic field. If that wasn't enough for you, it also has a 240 kilogram rover, which includes a suite of instruments such as a multitude of cameras, ground penetrating radar and a weather station. And it'll land sometime in the May to June timeframe after its proposed landing site has been mapped by that high resolution imager. Tiananmen 1 did perform its Mars orbit insertion burn successfully on February 10th and starting the process of moving itself into its proper science orbit. But there was something that did occur during its Mars orbit insertion burn that I can't recall having never seen before. These are still images from Tiananmen 1 that have been strung together to make a video which has been quite sped up but you get the idea as to what's happening. I legitimately don't remember ever seeing imagery taken during a vehicle's orbit insertion burn around a planet. This is fascinating to see these details like the thin atmosphere of Mars, Mars' surface and then my favorite little bit Tiananmen 1 vibrating as its engine begins the Mars orbit insertion burn. That is something else I tell you, quite a awesome sight to see. So China is now the sixth member of the Mars Club. Congratulations to them and good, good luck on landing that rover on the surface of Mars. I really hope that they make it because that would be so cool to have two separate rovers from two different countries on the same planet at the same time. That would be very, very awesome and this is so exciting to be here as we're exploring Mars. And we got one more, we got one more mission to Mars left to arrive. NASA's Perseverance rover will be going through the entry descent landing seven minutes of terror at around 2030 universal time on February 18th. Using the right kind of crazy descent stage with that sky crane landing technique, I'll certainly be clutching my pearls until touchdown is confirmed. We'll be including a link to NASA's webcast in our description down below so that way you can get yourself set up and ready to watch that when it goes live at 1915 coordinated universal time on February 18th this Thursday. Now you're also going to want to make sure to have your notifications on for our videos here tomorrow because we have a tomorrow special coming out very shortly after the landing of Perseverance that we'll be talking about the difficulty, the absolute absurdity of attempting to land something on Mars and you are most certainly not going to want to miss out on watching that. So now what we're going to do, let's pop on back over to low earth orbit and Ryan tell us a little bit something about some rides happening there aren't you? It turns out that NASA has been slightly concerned about keeping Americans on the international space station recently which I find confusing considering that SpaceX have already launched humans and Boeing are going in for another test flight of the Starliner with the hope of launching humans in September so why on earth would they be interested in purchasing another Soyuz seat worth 86 million dollars when SpaceX can do that for just 50 heck only for four million more dollars because you could launch a Falcon Heavy. Well here's the catch, NASA aren't actually going to be purchasing the Soyuz seat instead they're going to be giving Roscosmos a quote in-kind service or services in exchange for one mission. NASA hasn't said what these in-kind services would be although the synopsis where all of this data comes from is called international space station seat exchange. You can do the maths in your head. And just quickly before we get into some space traffic off the back of a successful flight test to space Virgin orbit have said that they are interested in moving into other markets within the space industry this could be related to their investment in the communication satellite constellation developer Sky and Space Global as Richard Branson has said that Virgin orbit could help other companies get their projects off of the ground maybe take a stake in the company and then get their satellites to orbit. Getting into some launches now then starting off with this the launch of the fifth Lotus S1 satellite atop this Soyuz 2.1B rocket. Lifting off at 2045 UTC on February 2nd out of the Pesitz Cosmodrome the satellite is now on trajectory to reach its 900 kilometer Sun Synchronous orbit. Lifting out of Slick 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station the B1060 booster launched 60 styling satellites and by doing so it set the new world record for the shortest booster recovery time ever at just 27 days between this launch and its previous the launch of Turks at 5a earlier in the year skimming off the previous 38 day record by nearly two whole weeks another successful landing on of course I still love you followed the launch setting it's another record this 24th consecutive landing of a Falcon 9 although only one faring half was recovered after being fished out of the ocean the other one sadly was destroyed. I don't think they were trying to recover both farings but don't quote me on that as it hasn't been confirmed. For the final launch of the week we had this Longmarch 3BE taking TJSW6 the space at 1536 also on February 4th. Taking to the skies out of LC3 at the Zhichang Satellite Launch Center in China the satellite is currently heading for a geostationary orbit around the earth. Right then this week's launch is covered let's look at some upcoming ones. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tamara Fascoe. Space weather this week is definitely picking up a bit as we take a look at our frontside sun you can see the two dark coronal holes one in the south and one in the north those are going to be rotating in through the earth strike zone here in about three or four days and they will be sending us some fast solar wind so we can get some activity from that but wait there's more take a look just above that southern coronal hole and you can see a huge snake-like filament and it looks like it wants to erupt it's just below that active region and it's sandwiched in these really unstable regions so we're kind of waiting on pins and needles because if it erupts it definitely will give us a solar storm but wait there's more if you take a look to the west of the the coronal hole in the south you'll see a puff that is actually a launch from the solar storm it looks like this particular solar storm is going to go west of earth but it might just graze us just a little bit and it's going to come right around the time that we're getting at fast solar wind so we could get multiple bump ups to the activity that we're expecting and it could bring us some more aurora and now for your martian minute we are less than a week away from the historic landing of the mars 2020 mission with perseverance rover and ingenuity helicopter in jezero crater so it's time of course to check the weather and believe it or not we actually did have the sun launch a solar storm toward mars about a week ago and as we take a look at our solar storm prediction model enlil this is nasa's version of the model you're looking down at the sun from the north pole you can see that solar storm launching toward mars and mars is that red circle down there but it looks like the storm actually passed to the east of mars and it maybe grazed the planet just a little bit but no big deal and since then we've been in the clear there've been no solar storms which means the space weather is all clear for the entry and descent of mars 2020 now let's take a look at the terrestrial weather on mars we know that we've had dust ups recently because we are just beginning to move out of winter in the northern hemisphere where jezero crater is and as we take a look at the thymus dust maps we do see a little bit of a dust up in and around is dis basin but it looks like it's just to the west of cirrus major where jezero crater is and it's pretty localized and this is the map that we've had since about the tenth so it's about the most recent version that we have and so it looks like this is going to be a small dust up it doesn't look like it's going to get any bigger and that's a beautiful sight because that means that everything once again is in the green for the landing both space weather and terrestrial weather are going to give mars 2020 the all clear so we're super excited to get everything down on the ground and start doing our new mission and then on top of that as we take a look at the temperatures well we're going to have to go to curiosity rover who's sitting just south of the equator and in the southern hemisphere where curiosity is in gale crater it's just becoming to be a bit a little bit of autumn and you're beginning to feel a chill in the air and a matter of fact the high at gale crater is a minus six celsius with a minus 74 as it's low for more details on this week's space weather including whether or not those solar storms and that fast solar wind is going to affect you come check out my channel or see me at space weather woman dot com just before this episode of the show closes i want to give a big thank you to all of our citizens at tomorrow the escape velocity orbital sub orbital and ground support citizens all contribute to the show and so can you at youtube.com forward slash tmro for just as little as one dollar a month or 72 p at current exchange rates for my fellow brits well that's it for this edition of tomorrow news make sure to stick around for next week's episode as i'm predicting it will be just as exciting if not more than this one but for the time being stay safe and goodbye utc on february the second out of the prezits out of the prezitesk prezitsk cosmic out of the prezitsk because it is i have to wait for the plane anyhow waiting on planes waiting on planes waiting on some planes waiting on planes waiting on planes waiting on the planes