 Hello all and welcome to Tomorrow News. This week, Ryan has so many things to talk about with SpaceX that I'm not even going to attempt to try to list them all. With NASA, gas, or grass, they don't get a free ride and their perseverance rover is making some progress in order to get itself to Mars. We've also got Space Weather with Dr. Tammeth Escove. Now, before we officially get started with our episode, just a reminder that if you really do like what we do here at Tomorrow, don't forget to subscribe to us, like our videos, hit the notification bell, share our videos everywhere, just, you know, kind of get us out there in front of all the folks that you know. So let's go ahead and get going for your Tomorrow News for the week of May 17th, 2020. And let's meet up with Ryan to start with our SpaceX update. Even though Starlink 7 has been delayed, SpaceX are preparing three Starships at the same time as production has looked to increase down in Boca Chica. SN4 is preparing for a third static fire as it gets ready for the 150-metre hop that I can't wait to see. SN5 is already stacked up in the vehicle assembly building, and just to boggle your mind even more, SpaceX have just made the nose cones for SN4, 5 and 6. The speed of development of this rocket is staggering, as SpaceX have made three vehicles in around a month and I believe that if they so wanted to, they could be pumping one of these out every five to seven days. In the countdown to Demo Mission 2, which is only 10 days away, SpaceX have released their ISS docking simulator, which is an online game which allows you to attempt to dock the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. The UI is actually modelled off of the real-user interface that is a part of the Dragon capsule, which I think is pretty cool. For anyone who hasn't played Kerbal Space Program or Orbiter before, I think that this is a pretty good entry-level place for you to mess about and practice in, and of course it has a Tesla Roadster in it. But it hasn't just been the virtual world where SpaceX and Tesla have collided this week as the SpaceX Astrovan, which is really an SUV, has been shown to the public through tweets from Jim Bridenstine. As was shown in the launch animation released by SpaceX, Bob Benkin and Doug Hurley will arrive at Launch Complex 39A for their historic mission within a Tesla Model X. Everyone who owns a Model X will turn into the owner of an astronaut transfer vehicle soon, but NASA have bought another seat on another type of vehicle, which I believe Jared has some more words on. With DM2 coming up, NASA is finally going to be flying American astronauts in American vehicles to the International Space Station, but there is a little bit of issue in terms of schedule and how that's going to play out. And because NASA wants the ISS fully occupied, well, they have gone off and bought a Soyuz seat. And that seat was a cool $90 million, and it's no shocker either, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was talking about purchasing this seat a year ago, and he did note that this also included covering the cost of training, operations, recovery, and cargo delivery. The NASA also agreed to take 800 kilograms of cargo up across several U.S. spacecraft missions in the future. For comparison, that $90 million seat aboard the Soyuz, well, we could fly you on a Crew Dragon for about $55 million per seat, or we could throw you on a Starliner for $90 million per seat as well. Yes, that's right, Starliner costs just as much as this current Soyuz seat does. And Roscosmos, they have been rising the prices on Soyuz seats ever since 2008. NASA has paid Roscosmos $3.9 billion since 2006, and that's kept Soyuz production at full steam, but with U.S. crewed vehicles returning for the grunt work of delivering American astronauts, flight rates have slowed to two Soyuz a year. With Crew Dragon and Starliner, especially Starliner, there are a lot of unknowns as to how the spacecraft are going to operate in space and how the systems are going to react and other things like that. So NASA, they are hedging their bets and are currently in talks with Roscosmos to try and purchase a Soyuz seat for a launch in April of 2021. Now that is a bit of a ways from where we are right now, so why don't we go ahead and talk about a departure and some launches this week? Let's kick it off at the International Space Station, where in Northrop Grumman resupply craft Cygnus NG-13 was unberthed and released into orbit on May 11th at 1609 Universal Time. Astronauts had packed it with trash and unnecessary equipment for disposal, and then it will perform a controlled re-entry. Now that won't be happening for a while, though, as NG-13 will deploy several CubeSats and NanoSats, while inside it will have several experiments being performed, including a demonstration to study sizable fires in space and systems to detect and put out a fire automatically. These extended operations of Cygnus NG-13 will continue till May 29th. Now this Cygnus spacecraft was named the SS Robert Lawrence Jr., the first African American selected to be an astronaut in the U.S. space program in 1967, who unfortunately died in a jet crash the same year. Heading to China, a Kaijiao 1A rocket launched on May 12th at 0116 Universal Time from the Jiquan Space Center, carrying two 100-kilogram Zhinyun satellites to begin a build-out of a constellation of 80 Zhinyun satellites for an Internet of Things data relay system. Now the side of this Kaijiao 1A rocket had several illustrations on it dedicated to the medical teams fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Three, two, one, there's ignition. And liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with USSF-7 for the United States Space Force on a mission dedicated to America strong. Wrapping up at Decate Canaveral Air Force Station, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 at 1314 Universal on May 17th. The Atlas V was in the 501 configuration, meaning a five meter payload ferry, no solid rocket boosters, and a single engine Centaur upper stage were used. The payload is a Boeing X-37B being flown by the US Air Force for experiments and research and development in orbit. A majority of that payload that the X-37B is carrying is classified as is the design of a new service module being utilized. However, if you did watch the scrub the day before, you did get to see a little blip of a clip showing an X-37B separating from a Centaur upper stage, and that was quite a treat. And here are your upcoming launches. If you've got your ticket to Mars, your launch window to get there is coming up, and NASA is working through the COVID-19 pandemic in order to assure that the Perseverance Rover and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will be launching on time. The launch window this year opens on July 17th and closes on August 5th, lasting 20 days. If you miss that window, you get to wait 26 months till around September 2022. In late April, Perseverance was attached to the descent stage, which will provide the sky crane maneuver, which will lower Perseverance to the surface of Mars for its planned landing on February 18th, 2021. On Mars, Perseverance will be operating an instrument that will be taking readings of radiation at the surface. That way we can know how do we build a habitat in order to protect you from that radiation when you're on Mars. And space weather is also something that you're going to have to worry about as well. And in order to talk a little bit about this week's space weather, here is Dr. Tamatha Scove. Space weather this week is beginning to show some signs of life. As we switch to our front side, son, you can see there's a lot of prominence activity on the East Limb, especially on the East Limb in the North. And also on the West Limb, we've had some solar storm launches, including one that looks like it's just going to go barely west of Earth, but it looks like it's not going to cause any aurora. However, we do have a coronal hole that's also going to be rotating into the Earth strike zone here over the next couple of days. And that could be sending us a burst of fast solar wind. So aurora could be happening at high latitudes for your aurora photographers. But also the big story is look at the bright regions that are also rotating into view off of the sun's East Limb, especially the top one. As we switch to our far-sided sun, this is Stereo A. And it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side. You can see that sunspot region in the Northern Hemisphere. Now, this is a long-persisting sunspot, and it will be given a designation by NOAA as it continues to rotate into Earth view. But you can also see there's a sunspot in the Southern Hemisphere that's beginning to build. Now, the Northern one has been firing off some solar storms, but it doesn't look like it's been giving us any big flares. So as it rotates further into Earth view, don't expect it to cause any issues for radio comms and space traffic, but it could easily boost the solar flux back into the marginal range for radio propagation. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see aurora and how these new cycle sunspots are going to affect you, come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. And to wrap up this week's tomorrow news, I just want to thank all of you who helped contribute to the shows of tomorrow. You've heard me say we really can't do this without you a bunch of times, and each and every one of you that does so, you're amazing. And I got to tell you, we really can't do this without you. Even though we're doing it in my garage right now, we still wouldn't be able to deliver this amazing show to you without your help. So if you'd like to contribute to the shows of tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join to do so and check out all of the great rewards we have available to you at the different levels of support. And of course, watching our shows, liking, subscribing to tomorrow, setting up notifications and sharing these shows everywhere, that's an incredible help as well. And that's Miko for this edition of tomorrow news. Thanks for stopping by this week. And until the next one, remember, stay safe, stay healthy, and keep exploring.