 We've got eyes on SpaceX's new V2 mini-starlings, relativity are just days away from launching whilst the Methilox race to orbit is really heating up and much more is coming up in Monday's Tomorrow Space News. Let's start off the show by taking a look at everybody's favourite flapless Starship S26. It's been getting frosty on one of the suborbital launch pads which nowadays are stripped back to just permanent test stands. Ship 25 was placed onto the other suborbital pad a few weeks ago but nothing has come of its stay at the launch site. No cryoproofs, no ambient pressure tests, nothing. After being removed from the stand it was rolled down the highway to the production site where it sat for a day before being moved to the former Massey's Range site which sits on the bank of the Rio Grande. Whilst Ship 24 is getting ready to go to orbit, Ship 25 is doing, well not a lot and Ship 26 is getting frosty, the aft end of Ship 27 has been waiting in the highway to be mated to its nose cone section. And would you look at that? It's been mated with the nose cone. There's a possibility that this ship will be the first to carry full size Starlink V2 satellites to orbit and there's more about Starlink later. There's a new test nose cone in town which has been designated NC-31. I'm going to take a guess that this probably stands for nose cone 31. Since last week's update, more shielding has been installed on the orbital launch mount which helps to protect the plumbing which surrounds the bottom of the super heavy booster. It's just one of the various upgraded improvements we're seeing taking place at the launch pad before the highly anticipated orbital flight test. SpaceX has released images of their newest design of the Starlink satellite which are officially being called V2 Mini. They're mini because the standard V2 design is designed for Starship which can house a much larger footprint than the small affairing of Falcon 9. The phased array antennas on the satellites have been beefed up compared to the previous design which SpaceX says will increase the capacity per satellite by approximately four times. The propellant for the ion engines which are used to position the satellites into their final orbit has switched from Krypton to Argon, increasing the thrust by 2.4 times and increasing the specific impulse of 1.5 times. The ion engines which are specifically Hall Effect thrusters are the first of the kinds that use Argon as the propellant. Most commonly the propellant used with Hall thrusters is what SpaceX used to use, Krypton and also Xenon. United Launch Alliance's Vulkan is another methalox rocket that is getting ready for launch and their CEO Tori Bruno recently shared that the company is aiming for May 4th for the maiden flight of the heavy lift vehicle. As well as serving as a test flight for ULA's latest generation of launch vehicle, the first flight of Vulkan will also be carrying multiple payloads to make its flight a bit more useful such as two demo project Kuiper satellites from Amazon and Astrobotics Peregrine Lunaranda. Unfortunately the engine qualification testing of the two Blue Origin BE4 engines has taken a little bit longer than expected. A liquid oxygen pump was producing 5% higher performance than what had previously been observed which according to Bruno could be an indication of a bigger issue. This means that the April launch window for Astrobotics Lander will no longer be available and May is the realistic option for this flight. In just a few days from now expect to see the Vulkan rocket roll out from ULA's vertical integration facility where it is currently fully stacked out to its launch site at SLIC 41. Once fully settled and integrated on the pad, ULA will send the Vulkan through its paces conducting multiple tanking tests before a full wet dress rehearsal where the entire launch countdown will be performed right up until just before the ignition of the main engines. The final test of the vehicle will be a flight readiness firing which will be a full wet dress rehearsal that is followed by a 3.5 second static fire of the BE4 engines under the first stage. It's not just ULA's Vulkan that has a launch date secured but relativity spaces made in flight has also been approved by the FAA. Marketing new calendars as March 8th at 1800 UTC is the soonest the newest small sap launcher can take to the skies. A three hour launch window has been approved giving teams time to work through issues which are expected to arise, being the maiden flight of not only the rocket type but also the company and the first flight from launch complex 16 since 1988. Of course the pad infrastructure has been completely re-hauled for relativity's needs with the new ground service equipment set up for methalox. Speaking of methalox, if Terra 1 can beat both Starship and Vulkan to launch and it successfully gets into orbit, it'll be the first rocket using the propellant to do so. However, if there are delays and the more experienced United Launch Alliance or SpaceX suffer less hurdles, that title could easily go to one of the bigger boys of the launch industry. As I mentioned before, LT16 hasn't been used for a launch since the late 80s and over the years since its inaugural flight in 1959, it's hosted various missiles such as the Titan 1, Titan 2 and multiple variants of the Pershing missile family. For a short period in the 1960s and 70s it was under the control of NASA where it was used as a test sand for static fires of the Apollo service module's AJ-10 engine. I just want to bring up something kind of useless with the naming conventions of these pads. LC-16 is on the Space Force side so surely it should be Space Launch Complex 16, not just Launch Complex 16. I'm going to be really picky on this one and probably going forward I'll just disregard what the pad is officially being called and just go with the LC on the Kennedy side, slick on the Space Force side. It makes understanding the many pads on the Space Coast much easier to understand in my opinion in terms of their location. If you have any thoughts or opinions on this and how we should present the names of the pads just let us know in the comments. If you cast your minds back to February the 16th you'll remember that JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries failed to launch their brand new Costa-Cutting H3 rocket. JAXA have released a press release detailing the reason why the main engine stopped early and the solid rocket boosters didn't ignite at all. A control unit detected a fault with an electrical system which provided power to the pair of LE-9 engines that are underneath the first stage. This unit then distributed the commands preventing the vehicle from going anywhere. JAXA and Mitsubishi will continue to investigate the disappointing result whilst they work towards a new launch date the 10th of March. Remember Launcher? They're developing yet another small-sat launch vehicle called Light. It's designed to be able to loft 150 kilos into low-air orbit but never mind because they've just been bought tacked by a brand new company called Vast. Vast are developing artificial gravity stations providing technology that allows long-term human habitation in space without the risk of detaying a human's ability to still walk around on their destination planet or celestial body. The easiest way of looking at this acquisition is that Vast needed talent to work on their artificial gravity stations and Launcher had the talent so the two companies have been kind of smushed together to make a bigger version of Vast. From this point on the light vehicle is dead so it didn't make much sense to continue with the Launcher company name if they aren't going to be launching rockets. All of Launcher's employees are becoming employees of Vast and the combined team will be moving into Vast's new headquarters in Gong Beach, California. The CEO of Launcher, Max Hout, will also be moving to Vast taking up the role of president of the company. This takeover doesn't seem hostile in the slightest. It looks as if it is a decision respected by both parties for the better of both. Well, now one company. Keeping key personnel on board will also probably make working at Vast a lot easier for the former Launcher employees as they'll already know a lot of their colleagues and managers. And though Launcher's now former headquarters were located in Hawthorne, the new HQ for Vast is also somewhere that isn't unknown to the aerospace industry. As you'll probably already know, this area is affectionately known as Space Beach. It's already home to Virgin Orbit, Spin Launch, Rocket Lab, Boeing and also Long Beach Airport. China's launch drought came to an end on Thursday as China's SAP 2.6 launched at 1149 UTC on the 23rd from Launch Complex 2 at the Qi Chang Satellite Launch Center in China. Successfully delivered to a geostationary transfer orbit, the payload is a high-throughput Ka-band communication satellite which will serve the East Asia and Australia region of the planet. Up next was Soyuz MS-23, the uncrewed rescue mission to the International Space Station. It launched on a Soyuz 2.1A rocket at 0024 Universal Time on Friday from site 31.6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The crew of Soyuz MS-22, who are commando Sergei Prokopyev and flight engineers Dmitry Patugin and Francisco Rubio, all now have an extended stay on the ISS as all of the assigned Soyuz crews will be sent back one mission, which launch approximately every six months. This is also because Soyuz MS-24 won't be ready for an earlier launch due to the production schedule being fitted around a bi-yearly schedule. Theoretically, West Coast most could bring the crew back straight away, but then the Russian side of the ISS would be uncrewed. Soyuz MS-23 arrived at the ISS China was launching again, the Egyptian Horus-1 satellite launching on this long march 2C at 0401 UTC on Friday the 24th. Horus-1 is a remote sensing satellite and it has been successfully delivered to its sun-synchronous orbit. Soyuz MS-23 docked to the Zenith port on the Poisk module at 0058 UTC on the 26th of February, giving the crew onboard to the ISS access to the 430 kilos of extra cargo that was brought up instead of three humans. Once Soyuz MS-22 undocks and returns to Earth, MS-23 will be relocated around the Russian modules to lean the dear port on the Pre-Chile module, which is a normal procedure for ISS docking logistics. There's a few Earth departures that are coming up, all of which are Falcon 9s. The first is Starlink Group 6 Mission 1, carrying the V2 Mini satellites from Slick 40 at the Cape. The second is Starlink Group 2 Mission 7 from Berndenburg, which aren't the new Starlink V2 minis, and the best has been saved until last as because of last night's scrub with the T-Tab issue preventing the Merlions from igniting, Crew 6 is now scheduled to fly no earlier than 0534 UTC on Thursday, carrying Steve Bowen, Woody Hoburg, Salton Alniedi and Anglia Fideov to the ISS. As China springs a surprise launch on us, that's all we're expecting. They've done it before, so I wouldn't put it past them. As always, thank you to the citizens of tomorrow who provide financial support to the show once a month and help to offset the cost of Station 204. If you want access to perks that our YouTube members received, make sure to consider joining the ground support Suborbital, Orbital Escape Velocity or Plaid Pro Plus citizens at the join button below. 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