 Another week of exciting space activity has just passed and I'm here to tell you all about it. Welcome everybody and if you're new around here I hope you like your stay. An old man who's just flown to the edge of space. A young man is about to do the same. A rover has just visited a parachute on Mars and if that wasn't enough SpaceX just received a brand new boat. So stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News for the week of July 19th 2021. For a long time the setup was simple. Just read the instructions on the west coast to support launches from Vandenberg and of course I still love you on the east coast to support the launches from Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force station. But as it turned out a few months back Florida was about to get real busy with launches and not wanting to crash their multi-million-dollar rocket boosters into the ocean they decided to bring just read the instructions over to the east coast to help with the increased launch cadence. Released that was the case until a few weeks ago when obviously was moved over to the west coast to support future Polar Starlink launches but you know from August the launches are ramping straight back up and in the future SpaceX may need to land all three cores of a Falcon Heavy on drone ships which you can't do if you only have two. Introducing the ship we've been teased for little years at this point a short full of gravitas has finally set sail from Louisiana headed through the Gulf of Mexico and has arrived at Port Canaveral. Elon tweeted some incredible drone footage showing the ship driving under its own power and whilst the other ships can hold the same GPS position by themselves they don't have the capability to go out and retrieve a booster with no other assistance. Well now theoretically ASOG should be able to do that although realistically a crude vessel would still need to be closed by and tugs would be required to bring it into port due to the tight nature of the area because you don't really want the bill of crashing into a Disney cruise liner. With some upgrades the other two drone ships could also have the same theoretical possibility which I genuinely think SpaceX may test out because it'd cost less and probably be quicker to retrieve. Theoreticals aside the cosmetics have changed when compared to the older ships as well the winds on the side now taper off at the end instead of a hard 90 degree angle which gives it a more sleeker look at the time most certainly a fan of. The markings are exactly the same you'll find on JRTI and obviously as well as at LC1, LC2 and LC4 but of course the new name is there instead. On the previous iterations of the drone ships the technical gubbins have been spread out on the front and back or left and right sides depending on which direction you look at it however on a short full of gravitas the majority of the technical gubbins are at one end. I find it fascinating to look at the evolution of the drone ships from the original Marmac 300 just read the instructions then the Marmac 304 of course I still love you and then the Marmac 303 just read the instructions and now the most modern Marmac 302 are short full of gravitas. New boats aside let's pop them down to Starbase and have a look what's been happening over there. Static fire testing isn't too far away for super heavy as two Raptor engines have arrived at the suborbital launch site and they've been attached to the underside of B3. Once we've seen some cryogenic proof tests that end well we should be expecting a static fire within a few days but we'll just have to wait and see what SpaceX decide to do. The crane dubbed Francon Crane because of its immense size has also been undergoing some upgrades with a new extended boom allowing it to lift rocket parts or parts of the integration tower that are even bigger than what it can already lift. The size of this thing boggles my mind look at it compared to the cars below it. The eighth and final section of the integration tower has also just been constructed and moved over to the orbital launch site and plopped on top of the seven sections already in place. Something else that has been spotted is a ring section littered with thermal protection tiles which could possibly be for Starship S20. The hexagonal shapes looked cool before in their small little patches but now with the light being bounced around an entire section of them that just looks so futuristic and so cool. We've also received word from Elon there's a new Raptor facility will be built in Texas which will work on producing the next generation Raptor 2 engines whilst the base back in Hawthorne will continue to work on the Arvac engines and new designs. Apart from one small weather hiccup which led to an hour delay Virgin Galactic's first fully crewed flight to space went off without a hitch. Releasing from White Knight 2 at 1525 UTC last Sunday the suborbital flight to 85 kilometers lasted around 10 minutes with the four mission specialists Beth Moses, Colin Bennett, Sarisha Bandler and of course Sir Richard Branson able to experience zero G for about two minutes or so. Because this flight originated from the United States and it flew over 80 kilometers which the FAA, US military and NASA agree on being the edge of space the members of the crew who hadn't flown to space before received their astronaut wings from Chris Hadfield. Branson also used this moment to share a special message for children back on earth. So all you kids down there I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars now I'm an adult in a spaceship with lots of other wonderful adults looking down to a beautiful beautiful earth to the next generation of dreamers if we can do this just imagine what you can do. The space flight itself was of course very exciting indeed but the overarching story behind all of this is the fact that Branson beat Bezos into space the net date for the Blue Origin flight is July 20th but that just didn't come soon enough for the person that runs a twitter account where a graphic was posted comparing spaceship 2 to New Shepard. Now a lot of the data here can be seen as true as the fact that New Shepard flies higher well that's true but if Bezos really has so much respect for NASA why would he recognize the Carmen line and not the 80 kilometers that the government recognizes. But Blue haven't even flown humans yet and what constitutes as a safe flight because if that is a hint towards the tragic accident of the spaceship one vehicle that is completely unacceptable but on the other hand they're now donating millions from the sea auction to space organizations which need funding so I don't know what to make of it. Speaking of that New Shepard flight the anonymous person who donated a lot of money to fly on said flight sadly won't be able to make the flight to space because of a schedule conflict. Now I'm sorry but who spends millions to fly to space and then decides something is more important than flying to space. It's okay though because whoever was meant to fly to space has been replaced by 18 year old Oliver Diamond from the Netherlands. His father Yoz Diamond was one of the bidders for the flight although he did not get the highest bid. If Oliver doesn't decide something is more important than a flight to space he will become the youngest human to ever fly into space a title which was going to go to Haley Arsenault when she launches on the Inspiration 4 mission. It isn't all bad though for the person who has some very important scheduling conflicts as they've been granted permission to choose a future Blue Origin flight to fly on. Moving from Earth to Mars and some interesting movements from China's wrong rover as it has paid a visit back to its own parachute which helped land it on the surface of the red planet. There isn't much else to see apart from the spherical back shell which protected the rover during re-entry and the eerie Martian landscape behind it. Staying on the subject of the Asian superpower China and reusable probably aren't words you hear in the same sentence every day as the country has become famous for dumping spent rocket boosters on innocent people's homes. However last Friday the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation or SASC announced that a test flight of a reusable suborbital vehicle had taken place launching from the Jiquan Satellite Launch Center and landing at Alxalig in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It is China so we don't have any other information from them although the statement released did say that the system uses integrated aviation and space technologies which is a very clear indication that the flight used a vertical takeoff and a horizontal landing much like the space shuttle. Hopefully this will lead to more development of reusable rockets and less villages being destroyed by hypergolic fuel tanks and before we head into some space traffic I have some very very good news to bring. Everyone's favorite space-based telescope the Hubble is finally back up online and working after it moved to a backup payload computer on Saturday. I'll be honest I was starting to get worried after the main payload computer malfunctioned all the way back on June 13th which is over a month ago but lucky the genius minds at NASA have managed to bring it back online. If you're worried about the future of Hubble don't be as a lot of astronomers are confident that the observatory will last way into the 2020s and possibly even the 2030s with that good news covered let's have a look at some space traffic. The first of two launches this week comes from China with the launch of Tian Lian-1 launch 5 atop a long march 3c slash e taking off on July 6th at 1553 UTC from LC2 at the Zhichang satellite launch centre all 2400 kilos of payload on board is headed for a geostationary transfer orbit. This satellite will join the other four Tian Lian satellites currently in geostationary orbit which provide communications coverage for the Zhenzai missions and the Tiangong space station. The next and final launch of the week comes again from China with the launch of the Zhongxi O2 satellites lifting off from the Tian satellite launch centre on the 9th of July at 1159 UTC the second launch of the Zhongxi network will help the growing constellation of remote sensing satellites and finally this week we have the undocking of the CRF-22 Dragon. Lifting off on June 3rd the capture had been docked to the ISS for a little over a month before undocking at 1445 UTC on the 8th of July splashing back down in the Atlantic Ocean on July 10th at 0329 UTC the Dragon was picked up by GoNavigator and was brought back to Port Canaveral where it was unloaded from GoNavigator on July 13th. Let's have a look at some upcoming launches. Space weather this week is definitely keeping us on pins and needles as we take a look at our front side sun you can see multiple active regions region 2842 43 and 44 with region 2844 firing off solar storms already but believe it or not this isn't the really exciting part of the story it's pretty quiet earth side as we take a look at our far-sighted sun this is stereo A and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side you can see region 2842 43 and 44 but look at all the other players on the East Lim and Stereo's view this these regions are actively firing off solar storms we've already had multiple solar storm launches that have kind of scared us a little bit because we thought they were earth directed but they're not meanwhile we've had less than 24 hours and we've already seen three solar storm launches from region 2844 a new one on the sun's south and in the north and these look to be pretty strong solar storms so it's getting to be interesting and as these regions rotate into earth view over the next week they could easily become mflare players bringing us radio blackouts radiation storms and they could affect space traffic pretty severely now returning to the two big solar storms that were fired on the sun's far side we need to take a look at the coronagraph images now these are the coronagraph images from the lasco instrument on the soho spacecraft and the view is from earth and we have the 13th on this side and the 15th on this side and you can tell they're both pretty big focusing on the 13th you can see the big signature all the way around the sun we call that a halo signature and that makes us believe that it's coming toward earth but in actuality in this case it's actually moving away from the sun and moving away from the earth on the sun's far side but this was likely fired from region 2840 which was that big mflare player that disappeared around to the sun's far side back what around the 10th or something like that and this region will be rotating back into view in about a week so we are really paying attention because this region looks like it's still a massive solar storm player now also on the 15th we had yet another massive solar storm you can see again once again it's a halo eruption and it's got this massive filaments stuff see all that really dense material right there going off to the south now it's hard to tell if this was actually fired from one region or actually multiple regions because there are three players on the sun's far side that look like they launched almost all in the same day so some of this could be from the same eruption and some of it could be from slightly different but nonetheless this is showing some massive solar storm launch and it's showing that the sun is definitely waking up because we're getting multiple solar storm launches in less than 24 hours for more details on this week's space weather including what those new far side regions could do once they rotate into earth view and how they could affect you come check out my channel we're seeing me at space weatherwoman.com before we head out for this week's episode let's thank the citizens of tomorrow their continued support make sure that not only the tomorrow news show can continue but that the live shows can return in the very near future if you'd like to join the escape velocity orbital sub orbital all-ground support ranks head on over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join feel free to share the show too i wouldn't complain thank you so much for watching i'll see you in a couple of weeks jarrod should be back soon and goodbye