 In this week's news, SpaceX celebrate their 20th birthday and they have a new booster design for Super Heavy. There's been some Artemis related updates and Russia isn't abandoning an astronaut. This is tomorrow's Space News. Ship 25's afterdome sleeve has shown up at Starbate, with it being flipped over at the production site in preparation to be stacked alongside all of the other components currently being manufactured. Ship 25's afterdome was also sleeved with the dome sleeve the next day. A bit of ship 24 can be seen here as the thermal protection blankets, which go underneath the Starbric TPS tiles, have been placed onto the nose cone barrel. RCS thrusters, which stands for the Reaction Control System, have been seen on the side of one of the barrels, at least in a prototyping phase, which is exciting to see as these will be needed to manoeuvre Starships when they leave the atmosphere, which will be the majority of the flight duration. They'll also be very crucial to the return and reuse of Super Heavy. Booster 7 is finally fully stacked after some shenanigans in the high bay last week, with components being fitted and then taken off again. It's seen some upgrades to the design, most notably with the positioning of the COPVs, which are filled with helium, to restart the centre raptor engines for the boostback burn and landing. Sleeving action doesn't end with the ships though as Booster 9's common dome has also been sleeved. Wide bay construction is wrapping up here, you can see a bracing structure being lowered into place between two corner sections of the Booster construction building. A new ship nose cone has been spotted in production tent 3 and it is nearly fully covered in the Starbrick tiles. One of Booster 4's grid fins has also moved and I don't know whether this was intentional or not. If it was intentional, it's cool to see some grid fin testing and if it wasn't then that must have been very windy or hit by a very big bird. It also looks like Ship 20 got a bit bored just sitting at the orbital launch mount not doing much so SpaceX moved it about and ended up leaving Ship 20 basically in the same place where it started. NASA has released new information on the human landing system and with it comes new renders for the lunar starship and tanker starship variants. The lunar starship no longer has solar panels around it and there seems to be a new tanker variant, possibly a fuel depot that stays in orbit permanently as it doesn't have any fins and it is taller than the normal tanker starship vehicles. NASA's budget for the 2022 fiscal year has been revealed and although the agency received $760 million less than originally requested in total the human landing systems budget has not been affected. The HLS program is getting $1.195 billion which is what NASA wanted however the spending bill does ask NASA to deliver a plan on how they will ensure safety, redundancy, sustainability and competition in the HLS program within 30 days of enactment. SpaceX turned 20 years old last week and on Twitter they posted a video of their highlights since their first launch from the quadriline atoll all the way up to their latest tests out of Boca Chica. As always there's also a link in the description so if you want to watch the whole thing then head over to SpaceX's Twitter. When you think of Bahrain the last thing you would think of is spaceflight but that hasn't stopped the nation from joining the Artemis Accords the international agreement between governments that are participating in the Artemis program which is of course led by NASA. With the signature the Kingdom of Bahrain has shown its commitment to peaceful exploration of space but there are no plans currently slated to assist with actual hardware development. Bahrain wasn't the first country to join the Artemis Accords in March however as that title goes to Romania. As Murray use E1 Piso the president and CEO of the Romanian Space Agency signed the document in Bucharest on March 1st. The addition of both nations now has increased the total number of nations to sign the accords up to 17 with many more expected to join Artemis in the near future. When humans return to the moon for the first time since the 70s is a part of the Artemis missions then they're probably going to want to get about without having to walk everywhere. Well that problem is starting to be solved by a startup called Astrolab who are based in a location we should all be familiar with Hawthorne, California. This is their rover prototype and it's called FLEX which stands for Flexible Logistics and Exploration. According to CEO Jarrant Matthews FLEX is going to be the most versatile rover ever created but to be honest that's not too difficult to achieve when there has only ever been one operational lunar rover which carried people which has flown on Apollo 15, 16 and 17. The footage you're seeing right now is from a test run that the company did near Death Valley where astronaut Chris Hadfield was at the wheel. During this run Astrolab simulated a lot of different activities which an astronaut or astronauts may have to do on the lunar surface which included setting up solar arrays for a lunar base and navigating difficult terrain with and without passengers. According to Hadfield the rover is a nice vehicle to drive and it's also very capable which is something that Astrolab are very happy to hear. Similar to the other commercial contracts such as the human landing system which was won by SpaceX with the lunar variant of Starship NASA is soon going to be launching a lunar terrain vehicle project. According to Jacob Bleacher the chief exploration scientist at NASA HQ the agency will soon be requesting proposals in the next few months. Astrolab have been developing Flex with the LTV competition in mind and they'll be going up against the likes of Lockheed Martin, General Motors and Northrop Grumman. The requirements for the LTV competition are quite large and they include the ability to operate for an eight hour moonwalk, being able to operate for 10 years and being able to operate during the night at the south pole of the moon. I don't know if you've ever been to the lunar south pole but it gets very cold with an average temperature of minus 13 degrees Celsius. Somewhere on Earth where it gets that cold is Baikonur, the location where all Soyuz crew launches commence. Seriously, check the link in the description. The average low in January is negative 13.6 degrees Celsius. That transitions us quite nicely to the next story which is debunking the false threats that Russia would abandon NASA astronaut Mark van der Heij who is due to depart the International Space Station on Soyuz MS-19 at the end of the month. Many stories from large news outlets have been stating that Roscosmos would not return the American from the station due to the economic sanctions that the US have imposed on Russia. These all seem to stem from one video released by RIA Novosti, a news organization with a bias towards the Kremlin who have now said that the video was a joke. Even though sanctions are being imposed on Russia from the US government, NASA isn't changing the way they interact with Roscosmos. Both nations jointly operate the most vital parts of the International Space Station so falling out would just be stupid and it would put innocent lives at risk in space. Even theoretically if Russia did abandon van der Heij and not allow them back to Earth on Soyuz, the US has crew Dragon and hopefully they'll have Starliner in not too much time. So there are options of returning van der Heij. They're just a bit more complicated than just flying back on Soyuz. Something that isn't complicated is space traffic as we've just had two launches since the last show. March 9th at 1345 UTC on the Space Coast to Astana Group 410, gone to top Falcon 9 B1052, the converted Falcon heavy side booster. Their 10th launch of the year was on the 10th week, keeping to their goal of reaching 52 successful flights this year and that also came with their 10th successful landing as B1052 landed smoothly on a shortfall of gravitas. Following a blue screen, I thought meant that the booster had maybe not done a good job at landing, but it's fine. It's completely healthy and safe. All 48 satellites have been deployed to their 317 x 305 km orbits at an inclination of 53.22 degrees. Launching at 1622 UTC on March 15th from Launchpad 3B at the Pacific Spaceport complex in Alaska was this Rocket 3 from Astra for the Spaceflight Astral 1 mission. It's their first collaboration with Spaceflight Inc and it's a technology demonstration mission testing for a prototype payload host platform. Coming up over the next seven days, we have Yogan 3402 on a long March 4th C, MS-21 on a Soyuz 2.1A Rocket and Astana Group 412. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tanneth Ascove. Space weather this week is getting very exciting. We're now coming down from a solar storm that brought us up to G2 levels. In fact, as we take a look at the Earth-facing disc, you can see back on the 10th into the 11th whoosh right there. That was the big solar storm launch. It created almost a full halo in coronagraphs and it let us know it was going to be a big solar storm. In fact, when it finally did hit it actually hit early and it actually passed an upstream monitor that we weren't expecting and that is solar orbiter. But strangely enough, when it hit Earth, it actually had a little bit of a different configuration than what we anticipated. Yet it managed to give us some gorgeous aurora, clear down into mid-latitudes for a little while before the whole thing just kind of shut off. Meanwhile, as we take a look at the rest of the disc, there are so many new active regions and big solar storms being launched, but none of them right now are Earth-directed. We do have region 2965 that's still a large flare player, but it's only been firing off little short bursts, so it hasn't been a problem for radio comms. Now as we switch to our far-sighted monitor, this is stereo A and it's looking at the sun a little bit from the side. You can see there's still a lot of activity on the far-sighted part of the disc. We also have a coronal hole, a finger-like coronal hole from the south. That is going to be sending us some fast solar wind here in about 10 days, so you satellite operators in Geo get ready. There's going to be some more spacecraft charging coming in a little bit more than a week. For more details on this week's space weather, including more details on that solar storm that just impacted Earth, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Tomorrow is crowdfunded, and the people in that crowd are the citizens of tomorrow who donate to us once a month. Each tier gives you different levels of rewards, with examples being escape velocity citizens getting access to the escape velocity discord channel, orbital citizens getting access to topic discussion for the live show, and of course every citizen has access to the post-show broadcasts of the tomorrow live show, where we get up to a whole bunch of random stuff. 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