 This week we have Boeing suddenly pulling out of the DARPA Experimental Spaceplane program. We've got SpaceX doing amazing things down in Boca Chica with their Starship rocket, and we've got space weather with Dr. Tamethascove. Now, before we begin, make sure that you hit that like button, smash on the subscribe button, and ring that notification bell till you're deaf in the ears because you want to get all of the latest and greatest videos right into your YouTube feed from tomorrow. All right, my name is Jamie Higginbotham. Let's get this thing started. It's Space News for January 26th, 2020. This last Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020, Boeing announced that they'd be backing out of a deal with DARPA to build an experimental spaceplane. That's a pretty click-baity and fantastical title, but it is true. It also doesn't paint the entire picture here, and I don't think it's fair some of the conclusions that are being drawn. For that, we really need to understand who DARPA is and what they're trying to accomplish. All right, going back to the beginning, DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and was founded in 1958 by President Eisenhower, although at that time it was under the name ARPA. It is currently a government program under the United States Department of Defense. And if ARPA rings a bell for some reason, probably should. This is the agency that helped create the foundation work for some of the amazing stuff we have in our lives today. This is a group that works on huge projects that impact humanity at its core. In 1962, they created ARPANet, which was the foundation for the internet itself. And while Xerox Park gets the credit for the graphical user interface, actually that concept was originally seen in ARPA project called the Augment System. Back in 1961, a decade before Xerox started to tinker with it, and well before Microsoft and Apple grabbed the idea. How about GPS? DARPA has the foundation work for what we now know is the global positioning system all the way back in 1964 with projects called Transit and NavSat well ahead of the 1978 GPS release date. How about something a little more modern? In 2003, they worked on a voice assistant project which then spun off and became Siri. That was then later acquired by Apple. Their next-gen voice stuff is also insanely cool. It's like nothing you have heard before. This is an agency that works on impossible projects. And because of that, they have a lot that are just not successful. When you work beyond the bleeding edge of technology and you're inventing things for the very first time, you're going to encounter a lot of failure. And that's okay. So how does all of this relate to Boeing pulling out of the DARPA contract? Understand this was a DARPA project to push access to space forward far further than we've ever been able to do. The program was originally known as XS-1 and was then later renamed to XSP or Experimental Spaceplane. It's broken into three phases. The first phase we saw Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Mastin Space design a rapidly reusable spaceplane architecture, but not actually build anything. The design called for a vehicle able to launch 10 times in 10 days with a recurring cost of no more than five million per flight while also carrying a 1,400 to 2,300 kilogram payload to low earth orbit. DARPA's favorite design would move on to phase two and three which Boeing then won for $150 million back in 2017. Their winning design was called the Phantom Express. Much like the space shuttle, this was a vertical takeoff horizontal landing vehicle. It was about the size of an executive jet. It would use an aerojet rocket-dyne AR-22 engine which is a sister to the space shuttle main engine or RS-25, but modified to be able to fly 10 times in 10 days. They had some really great flight heritage there and it seemingly worked. In 2018, they ran a test with this engine on the stand doing 10 100 second full throttle firings in 10 days and they completed it with time to spare. This DARPA program pushed engineers to do things better, faster and cheaper. One example of this is clearing up moisture that would gather in the engine between tests. Trying to fire the engine with moisture still in it could actually be catastrophic. That was actually the same for the space shuttle and for the space shuttle main engine, this procedure took days. For the AR-22 on the other hand, well, they got it down to just six hours and that's just one example of time savings. So what happened? They were making great progress, engineers are learning things. Why did Boeing kill the Phantom Express? Actually, only Boeing knows. Last Wednesday, Boeing informed DARPA that they would be pulling out of the XSP program immediately after following a quote, detailed review, unquote, that's it, that's all we know. It's easy to hate on Boeing or think of this as a failure. But I wanted to get some context as to DARPA's insight in this and I happen to know someone who used to be a contractor at DARPA, although not on this specific program. His name is Tim Bailey and he had some really insightful things to say about DARPA as an agency and how they view success and failure. It's important to have some context when you're talking about DARPA programs. DARPA has a different way of looking at and assessing risk when it comes to putting a program together. So in this case, they were looking at advancing a technology. They were looking at advancing not a single piece of technology, a single endpoint, but really how can the entire industry move forward if this technology happens? They look at how the program progressed and what came out of the program as a whole, not whether or not they reached a very specific endpoint at the end. If good companies were funded and amazing research was done out of this, that can be a huge win for the industry. You don't need to look at a single program and a single endpoint as a win-lose scenario. Sometimes it's just about, did you create a scenario? Did you create an environment where everybody can win at something? And that's DARPA's job is to explore what's possible out there. It's not to get to some endpoint and put a satellite into a very specific orbit at a specific time. No, it's to figure out, can you do that? Could you put 70 satellites into very specific orbits and points in space inside of a week? That's a DARPA hard problem. How do we make humanity a space-faring species? How do we create responsive space technologies? That's where you can see the big wins. If you're focused narrowly on, did this one piece of technology, did this one program, did this one little thing work? Of course it's gonna be win-lose, black and white, you failed, but in the scope of industry, in the scope of what we're trying to do, everything is a win. Boeing now knows the limits of what they're willing to do in a program like this and how much money they're willing to put in and how much technology they think they can develop. That's huge for a company like Boeing. It's also an opportunity space for other companies to step in and say, if Boeing isn't willing to do this or if Boeing doesn't wanna continue down this road, maybe there's opportunity for somebody else to do that in the future and to make that case to other people to give a smaller company an opportunity the next time. So overall, I understand that there's frustration that things didn't work out the way they wanted to. There's a mismatch in what we thought was gonna happen and what actually happened. And we can address that, but we don't have to look at it as a failure in the program as long as we still learn things from it and we can still move forward after it. I personally think that's a really great way to look at it, but to be fair, there are those who have their doubts as well. Doug Messier, Parabolic Arc did publish this quote. The winning bidder, Boeing, really wasn't interested in the technology. The company was actually interested in government funding and keeping other companies from developing the system. That quote was taken a bit out of context here, so I do suggest heading over to Parabolic Arc and reading his whole take. They are also super awesome over there and if you're a space nerd like I am, I highly suggest you support and subscribe. I also took a moment to reach out to some of the people we know that worked on the phase one part of this program because there were more than just Boeing working on this and they didn't really wanna speak on the record, but they were all understandably disappointed in Boeing's decision. In the end, I don't think we have enough data to really call this a failure just yet. And actually, when you look at how DARPA works and what it's trying to accomplish, I really don't think it's a failure at all. This is just a path that doesn't work. Maybe next we'll try a different path that does. Now this entire time, you're probably thinking to yourself, we're usable rockets. That sounds a lot like SpaceX and Elon Musk. And so now I'm gonna take a quick moment to hand it over to Ryan, who's going to give us our latest SpaceX update. SpaceX News has just kept getting busier and busier this past week, but to start off with, Elon Musk revealed some awesome data at the post-Inflate abort test press conference. At the fastest point during flight, the crew-dragged spacecraft reached MUC 2.2 and a height of 40 kilometers. This is a crazy speed to be thinking about, as the spacecraft is traveling faster than Concord ever did and three times far higher than a commercial jet. Another exciting point Elon mentioned was when Demo Mission 2 will hopefully happen. He said that the hardware will be ready by the end of quarter one by the latest. However, they will have to check every system several times before they are certain that they are ready for human flight, which means that SpaceX could be launching actual humans into space before June 30th. And I am so excited for this that I physically cannot describe it and I find it crazy to think that this will finally break up the nine-year gap of human spaceflight from US soil since STS-135 in 2011. And also as it turns out, the second stage of the Falcon 9 news during the Inflate abort might have actually survived the gigantic fireball that could be seen off the east coast of Florida. As a video released by US launch report shows that what seems to be the second stage with the interstage steel attached falling down towards the ocean. On the 27th of January to round 1450 UTC, SpaceX are also looking to launch the next batch of 60 Starlink satellites on the mission named Starlink 3, as it was delayed from the 24th of January. Sadly, I couldn't find any information about how well the special coating on one of the satellites that was launched on Starlink 2 worked. However, if you would want to know more about that, I'd recommend you go and watch the last week's Space News episode where I explained what SpaceX were doing to help astronomers see into the cosmos who could be affected by Starlink's brightness in the night sky. Starship has also been making some awesome progress over the past few weeks with two test tanks being constructed. Around two weeks ago, two bulkheads were mated to create a tank for pressure testing. This tank reached 7.1 bar, which only six bar required for orbital flight. However, SpaceX didn't stop there. As Elon Musk said on Twitter that if they used an improved welding technique, they could possibly get to around 8.5 bar, which will allow them to reach the 1.4 safety limit needed for human flight. So over the past few days or so, the team down at Boca Chica have been constructing another tank. The chances that this tank will have the same end as the original is very high, as it will need to be tested to its limit to ensure that it could be used within Starship for safe human flight to the moon, Mars, and possibly beyond. Ahead a tank for Starship was also pressurized just before the weekend. However, this one didn't meet the same fate of its cousin, as it is still intact when the test was completed. You can also see on the video from Boca Chica gal that SpaceX were actually flying a drone above the tank. And with this week's SpaceX news wrapped up, it's time to head back up on orbit to station 204. Thanks for the update, Ryan. It's kind of excited to see what they're doing down in Boca Chica. All right, we didn't have any launches this last week, but we do have some coming up this next week. So here's a list of all of those, along with everyone's favorite launch. Since there wasn't a whole lot of traffic, there was a bunch of stuff happening in weather. I'm now gonna hand it over to Dr. Tametheskov, who brings us our latest solar weather report. Space weather this week started out quiet, but it sure didn't stay that way. As we switch to our front side, son, you can see everything was pretty bland until we started seeing a new sunspot emerge on the Earth-facing disk. This region ended up being one of the biggest sunspots we've seen in quite some time. And you can see it fizzling and farting there. This became named region 2757, and on the 25th, it fires off an Earth-directed solar storm. It's kind of hard to see here, and we had to wait for the models to kind of get an idea of when it's gonna hit Earth. Right now, it looks like it's gonna hit Earth right about the 29th, but it's probably gonna be a pretty weak storm. You know, we're not that far from solar minimum, so these storms aren't all that strong yet. But hey, who cares? We're seeing these solar storms being launched far more frequently. And as activity continues to ramp up, these storms are gonna get stronger. But believe it or not, this is not the only story. We also have a new bright region that's rotating into Earthview on the southeast limb. This is a solar cycle 25 sunspot. It's a new cycle sunspot, or it's actually a active region. It didn't last as a sunspot all that long, so it's probably not gonna get a designation from NOAA. You know, these new cycle sunspots have a tendency to be a bit shy. They kind of poke out onto the surface of the sun and then dive back down. So we're gonna have to deal with these being bright regions for quite some time yet. Now, as we switch to our far-sighted sun, this is Stereo A. It's our partially far-sighted monitor. You can see that active region kind of emerging in the center of the disk in the south. Now, this region is helping to boost the solar flux. We are now back into the balmy 70s for emergency radio communications and amateur radio operators. But luckily this region is not doing any serious flaring, so we don't have to worry about radio blackouts or anything like that for space launch, affecting communications, or any other types of space traffic. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see aurora when that solar storm hits on the 29th, come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. And before we go, a quick note on an anomaly that happened at Firefly Aerospace this last week. There was a fire that occurred during a test fire during the first stage for Firefly's Alpha small satellite launcher. You can't really see too much in this video that they tweeted, but no one was hurt and emergency crews arrived on the scene quickly. The fire itself was extinguished by the automatic ground fire suppression systems on the pad itself. Firefly says they're reviewing data and looking to find root cause. Just on a personal note, I thought it was actually really cool that they tweeted this out. This was a test. This was in a test stand. This is when you want to see the anomalies happen right here on the ground. That's how these things work. It's part of the learning process. It's not a failure. It's just a learning step forward. This seems to be the theme of this particular show. So I was really happy that they were so transparent in an industry that seems to be very, very opaque lately. So kudos to Firefly Aerospace for tweeting that out. That's our show this week. I'd like to thank everyone so much for watching and especially our members over on YouTube. These are the people who make this show happen. We couldn't stay on orbit without you. Our fueling costs are insane. We have launch costs. It's crazy. Also got to keep the lights on here at station 204. If you'd like to help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash T-M-R-O slash join. And as a reminder, if you wouldn't mind hitting that like button, mashing on the subscribe button and ringing that notification bell a whole lot, it really helps us as well. We want to hit 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2020. And as I mentioned in a couple of previous shows, analytics says that's not going to happen. I'd like to thank you all so much for watching. We'll see you next week. Now you have to wait while I install Google Docs. We'll wait together. It's my birthday this Thursday. Oh, I should have brought a towel. Dang it, I'm 42. So I should have brought a towel while I'm turning 42.