 Happy New Year everybody and welcome to the first new show of 2022. A SpaceX booster has come back to port, a little bit wonky, Starbase has barely slowed down over the holiday period if at all. China is concerned about Starlink with their space station, there has been a couple launches and a lot more to cover so stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News which is for the week of January 4th 2022. SpaceX marked a big milestone with the final mission last year CRS 24 when the booster B106-9 became the 100th orbital cast booster to make it back to Earth. The stay out at sea was much longer than we'd expected however which started to raise eyebrows on what was happening because of the peculiar behaviour with the lack of movement from both just read the instructions and the support ship Doug. With the landing on December 20th the vessels set off from their spot in the Atlantic on December 23rd and arrived off the coast of Port Canaveral on Christmas Eve. GoNavigator then went out to meet both ships before all three started to come into port and as you can gather from this photo onlookers awaiting the arrival of B106-9 were given a slightly tilted surprise. We've seen tilted boosters before such as with SXM7 and Crew 1 and it is normally a sign that the seas were rough. B106-9 landed in the middle of the drone ship and as you can tell it is very much no longer in the middle of the deck. This bumpy ride has resulted with a part of the yellow railing being bent and significant damage to the bells of the Merlin 1D engines as well as some damage to the octagrabber. It is quite obvious that B106-9 is going to need a bit more time being refurbished than the other boosters but that is no fault of the booster. Hopefully the SpaceX team will be able to repair or replace the legs and the Merlins because it would be a shame to see this booster be thrown out after only one use. Phobos, one of the two oil rigged SpaceX are converting to floating launch pads for Starship, has been seen in Mississippi undergoing its conversion. Compared to the first time we saw Phobos the majority of the structure above the main deck has been removed, most notably the main tower in the middle. There is still a lot of equipment on board however you can see two cranes on there as well as a container looking thing on the left side. It's not good news for launching out of Boca Chica however and as you've probably heard by now the Federal Aviation Authority's programmatic environmental assessment has been delayed to February 28th from the original completion date of December 31st 2021. SpaceX is currently having to write up responses to over 18,000 comments left on the draft PEA as well as finishing off the final PEA for the FAA to review and hopefully accept. This delay does put the possibility of Booster 4 and Ship 20 being the first orbital pair in Jeopardy as SpaceX will still need a launch license once the PEA has been accepted. Booster 5 may not even be used as the new Raptor 2 engines are believed to not be compatible with Raptor 1 vehicles and Raptor 1 production has come to a stop. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is still adamant that Ship 20 and Booster 4 will be the first pair that go orbital so only time will tell if that will be the case. The two still went through some tests over the last week so let's take a look. Booster 4 has been undergoing some progenic proof testing where the team fooded up with some very very cold liquid nitrogen. You can see about a third of the top third of the Booster frosting up as a result of the steel being cooled from the nitrogen being pumped into the methane tank before it then melted away and the Booster started venting. Just as this first test finished the bottom of the Booster started frosting up as nitrogen was being pumped into the oxygen tank before that frost also started melting away as the nitrogen was vented. Ship 20 has static fired before and it has performed a static fire again with all six Raptor engines lighting up for another time. There isn't much more to add other than the fact that the Starbrick thermal protection tiles seem to stay in place like an only spot two or three maybe four white patches. It is also important to note that other forces could be affecting the robustness of the tiles as Ship 20 is connected to the ground during the static fire which obviously it won't be during flight. S20 was refuelled from the tank farm later that day and SpaceX went for a second attempt at a static fire but it was aborted late enough that the water daily system went off. Following the static fire test from S20 the SpaceX branded LR11000 was hooked up to the top of Booster 4 as it prepared to be lifted off of the orbital launch man and the next day cruise descended upon the Booster with the quick disconnect being disconnected from the bottom of B4 and following that Booster 4 was lifted up into the sky. This move is suspected to give the teams down in Boca Chica a bit more room to work on both the orbital launch mount as well as the underside of Booster 4 as both will still have work done to them over the coming weeks as we get closer to the orbital flight test. In the meantime however Booster 4 was lowered onto the transport stand and moved over to the landing pad during this very pretty sunset. The new 33 Raptor Afterdome has been sleeved which will go at the bottom of a super heavy booster. It could maybe go to Booster 7 which is currently under construction in the high bay but it could also go to Booster 8 with the new Raptor 2 engines. The wide bay has been receiving some more prefabricated parts and it has grown a bit over the last two weeks. Soon this will become one of the largest buildings on the side and it will be able to hold multiple vehicles. Finally from Starbase part of S22's nose cone barrel has been cut open possibly as a pathfinder for the cargo door on Starship. Moving over from the ship to the link China has informed the United Nations that they have had to move their Tiangong 3 space station out of the way to avoid potential collisions with two Starlink satellites in October particularly Starlink 1095 and 2305. These were in a lower than usual orbit as they had lowered their altitudes as a part of the orbiting measures at the end of their lives. Jonathan McDowell tweeted this graph showing the distances between the satellites and the space station and you can see at their closest point they were only three kilometers apart. The US government has requested that Max Polyakov and his investment firm Doosphere Venture Partners, the largest shareholder in Firefly Aerospace, should sell his shares in the company citing national security concerns most probably caused by the heightened tensions on the Ukraine-Russia border. Officially Ukraine and the USA are allies but the government must be nervous in case of an invasion from Russia. They don't want any technology being stolen. Because of this request, Firefly is holding off preparations for its second attempt at an alpha launch which was originally scheduled for early 2022. It is sad to see the person that basically saved Firefly after they fired for bankruptcy in 2017 be asked to step aside physically and financially as last year Polyakov was also quietly moved off of the board of directors at Firefly. If the US government asks you to do something you kind of have to do what they say especially when they control your launch pad and your mission contracts. South Korea's new rocket and first entirely domestic rocket officially called the KSL V2 but more affectionately known as Nuri failed its first flight attempt back in October after a failure from the third stage of the vehicle which we have now been told was caused by improperly anchored helium tanks which caused the upper stage engine to shut down 46 seconds early. Kari has said that the support structures holding the helium tanks inside of the third stage oxidiser tank were not properly designed to account for a force referred to as buoyancy which rises with the altitude of the rocket. The agency has confirmed that they will be fortifying the helium tank anchors and the oxidiser tank structure. That will take time however as the next flight of Nuri currently scheduled for May could be delayed. Because it was Christmas last week there was no news episodes so there are a few launches and ISS movements to cover so let's start off in Japan. In Marsat I6F1 launched atop a H204 from the Shinobu Launch Complex at Atanagashima Space Center at 1433 UTC on December 21st. The 5,470kg payload is headed for a geostationary Earth orbit on the 45th flight of a H2A rocket. Having covered the launch in our last episode CRS-24 docked to the International Space Station at 0841 UTC on December 22nd, carrying on board more than 2,948kg of research hardware and crew supplies. Later the same day there was an ISS departure as at 2303 UTC the Progress MUM spacecraft departed the Pre-Chile module of the Russian segment which it carried up to the station. December 23rd at 1012 Coordinated Universal Time saw the launch of Cheyenne 1201 and 1202 on top of this Long March 7A rocket from LC201 at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in China. The two satellites have a combined mass of approximately 6,000kg and are officially labelled as Technology Demonstration Satellites. The James Webb Space Telescope was a fantastic Christmas present to us all which successfully lifted off at 1220 UTC on December 25th on top of this Ariane 5 ETA from ELA-3 at the Guyana Space Center in French Guyana. It's heading for Lagrange Point 2, otherwise known as L2 and at the time of writing this script it has just passed the 60% point of distance completion. ZUAN-102E launched the top at Long March 4C at 0311 UTC on December 26th from LC9 at the Taian Satellite Launch Center. ZY102E is a Chinese Earth observation satellite and its primary purpose is to get 5m resolution imagery for the land resource surveys, disaster monitoring and forestry and ecological monitoring. On board was also C8S-9. December 27th at 1310 Coordinated Universal Time saw the launch of OneWeb 12 from Site-31-6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz 2.1B did its job and placed the payload into the desired initial 450km 87.4° Low Earth Polar Orbit. The first test flight of the pairing of the Angara A5 with the Peerzi upper stage was a failure launching at 1900 UTC on December 27th from Site-35-1 at the Plezotetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. We don't actually know what happened, all we know is that the rocket didn't work in one form or another. December 29th saw two back-to-back launches from China and the final two of 2021, the first of which was Taian-Hui-4 which launched at 1113 UTC from Site-9401 SLS-2 at the Zhiquan Satellite Launch Centre on a Long March 2D. The Earth observation satellite is currently heading for an approximately 500km Sun Synchronous Orbit. And finally, TJSW-9 launched atop a Long March 3BE just 5 hours and 30 minutes later at 1643 UTC from LC2 at the Zhichang Satellite Launch Centre. Heading for a geostationary Earth orbit, the TJSW-9 satellite is a classified communication technology experiment satellite believed to be for the Chinese military. Coming up over the next seven days, we have just one launch which is starting Group 4, Mission 5. Just before we wrap up this week, thank you to all the citizens of tomorrow who help us stay on the internet, the escape velocity orbital suborbital and ground support citizens receive cool perks which includes but is not limited to access to the live pre and post show of the tomorrow live broadcast, space news script and private channels in our newly re-hauled public Discord server which you can find at the link in the description. If all that sounds like something you may enjoy then head over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join or just click the join button below. If you know around here and you are yet to subscribe then you should definitely do so. There is so much exciting stuff coming in the Wilder Spaceflight in 2022. You do not want to miss it. That's all from me this week, thank you for watching and goodbye. you