 Hey everyone, welcome to tomorrow. Coming up we have a proton rocket that launched a military satellite for Russia and the next International Space Station crew is set to launch on a Soyuz rocket. This is your space pod for December 15th, 2015. So Russia's proton M rocket launched on its 7th flight of this year on December 13th at 019 UTC and it was launching the Garpoon Military Communication Satellite which went on a 9 hour journey into geostationary orbit which thankfully resulted in a successful deployment of the satellite. Not that I'm wanting Russia's military to have even more capabilities but at least the spacecraft separated successfully. Capable of making multiple burns, the Breeze M upper stage carried the Garpoon from a suborbital trajectory up to geostationary orbit. Unfortunately there is no footage of the launch itself but we do have some really high definition footage of the rocket being rolled out to the pad and you can see some very cool angles on this. But anyway, the Garpoon satellite it launched, meaning Harpoon, is a series of new generation space to ground communication satellites that are dedicated to support Russia's military space assets. Little is known about the Garpoon satellites themselves other than that they are designed to provide data relay capabilities for Russia's fleet of reconnaissance satellites such as the Persona Electro optical imaging spacecraft for example. The launch had originally been scheduled for earlier in the week however it was delayed after the failure of its Soyuz 2-1V to deploy the Canopus ST satellite last week. The proton launch was delayed to allow checks on its payload attachment and separation devices due to concerns of similarities between them and the device recently used on the Soyuz. This launch was the 79th orbital launch attempt of 2015 worldwide and the 7th proton launch of the year. Five of the six previous launches were successful with May 2015's launch of a MEX-SAT-1 satellite failing to achieve orbit. Proton has had 11 failures in the last 10 years. In any case, the next proton launch is scheduled for December 23rd and that is also going to be a proton M with a Breeze M upper stage and that hopefully will be carrying the Express AMU-1 communication satellite so hopefully everything goes well for that launch as well. So anyway moving right along, the next three crew members who are going to the International Space Station are set to launch today at 11.03 UTC on a Soyuz FG rocket and they will be riding inside of the Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft and the TMA-19M is actually the 128th overall flight of the Soyuz spacecraft ever since their first flight in 1967. Holy crap that's a lot of Soyuz. The crew consists of astronaut Timothy Kopra of NASA, Tim Peake of the European Space Agency, also the first British astronaut and also Yuri Malenchenko from Roscosmos. The spacecraft will take advantage of the new three hour rendezvous maneuver to quickly arrive at the space station where it will stay for six months. Expedition 46 commander Scott Kelly and flight engineer Sergei Volkov and Mikhail Kornenenko of Roscosmos will return to Earth in March of 2016 on the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft. They will be replaced by the Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft and three new crew members in the same month, March of 2016. At least for the new crew arriving for Kopra, Peake and Malenchenko they're going to be doing lots of science experiments and lots of really cool stuff at the station but I think our correspondent Lisa Stojanowski would do a much better job of explaining what type of science they're going to be doing there and what sort of experiments are planned for their expedition. So hopefully she'll be talking about that in her next space pod as well. In any case, thank you for watching everyone and please let us know what you think about these two particular missions. By the time that this video is live and you're actually watching this, the ISS crew may have already launched so hopefully everything goes off with that without a hitch and everything is perfectly safe and fine with getting them up to the space station. And as for the proton rocket, what do you think of the different series of failures that the proton has experienced over the years? Do you think that it's still going to be a good vehicle to use until it's planned to be retired in 2020? And if you have any other sort of ideas or thoughts about the proton rocket, please share them in the comments below or on any of our social media. Also if you were willing to enable, please consider contributing to our Patreon campaign so that we can continue to produce content like this. We have moved from a per video donation basis to a monthly donation basis so should be a lot easier for everyone to understand exactly how things are going to work for that. So if you can and you can help us to make these videos then please do so by visiting patreon.com slash space pod. Thank you again for watching this video. My name is Michael Clark and hopefully you know just a little bit more today than you did yesterday thanks to tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.