 In this week's news, NASA unveils the company's which will build their new spacesuit. Crew Dragon has more confirmed flights, SAS is back and China has just launched another crew into space. This is Tomorrow's Space News. We're starting off with Crew Dragon. Don't worry, we'll get to Starship soon. As NASA has just announced, they'll be purchasing five more commercial Crew Dragon flights for ISS Crew Rotations. This will ensure that there are crew flights available all the way through to 2030, with just the current date which the United States are officially supporting the station until. This extends the missions out until Crew 14, adding on to the 2021 extension to Crew 9. With Boeing's Starliner now coming online, alternating flights can take place, with each company performing one crewed flight per year, and after Boeing's contract finishes in 2028, SpaceX can return to two flights a year. NASA could still buy additional flights from SpaceX if they need to as well, so do keep that in mind. We've gotten a couple sneak peeks at what SpaceX's manufacturing facilities could look like in the future, as Elon Musk has shared on Twitter some images from an internal SpaceX update talk. Here is the first official SpaceX rendering of their PES satellite dispenser system, where two stacks of Starlink version 2 satellites will be dispensed simultaneously one after another. He also shared a photo of the first Raptor 2 engines being installed underneath Booster 7 inside of High Bay 2, which ends the speculation and pretty much confirms that Booster 7 is getting ready for a static fire at some point in the future. We also got a look at a render of a Starship factory of the future, which is Star Factory, currently being assembled at the production site at Starbase. As you can see, it's taking a color scheme very similar to that of Hangar X at the Cape, and on top of that, included with this render of the Starship production site on Robert's Road near NASA's vehicle assembly building. On the left is Hangar X with its extension completed, and in the background you can see the massive factory where Starship components will be manufactured. There is only one High Bay in this render sadly, similar in shape to High Bay 2 at Starbase, however this is only a render. Everything could change. That's the current future, at least in the mind of Elon Musk, so let's take a look at what has actually been happening over the last seven days. Ship 24 has successfully completed its first cryogenic proof test following repairs, which were needed after a dodgy sound and flying tiles during an ambient pressure test. As you can tell by how much of the vehicle is covered in ice, the majority, if not all, of the fuel tanks were filled up with liquid nitrogen, as the SpaceX team tested out the plumbing at cryogenic temperatures. The following day, S-24 was moved from the cryostation at the orbital launch pad to suborbital pad A, and then hooked up to the crane. The following morning, the ship's aft flaps were folded up, locked into place, and then the ship was lifted up and placed onto the launch mount. Installed on the top of this mount is the equipment which will allow thrust ram tests, which will simulate the forces of the thrust from Raptor engines, without having to fire anything. Work has also been taking place on the fallen tiles, with the white gaps being patched up with new starbrick tiles. The test campaign continued once again with a second cryo test being performed on Monday, but of course, this time it was at suborbital pad A. The next ship along the line, S-25, has had its nose cone rolled out of tent three into the open Texan air. This makes one of the forward flaps fully visible, which seems to have all of its thermal tiles installed. The start of another nose cone has also been spotted, with it having a much smoother design. Each iteration is getting smoother and smoother, and they make the vehicle look so much more slick. Booster 8 has been stacked in the high bay with the top part of the Super Harry Booster being placed onto the engine section. This was then followed by the liquid oxygen tank section being rolled into high bay too, alongside Booster 7. Booster 7 is receiving its Raptors, and once Booster 8 is ready it'll be receiving Raptors eventually as well. Two more engines were delivered, which you can see here. Star Factory construction continues, as well as this new structure which is being assembled near the production site. What do we think it is? Let me know what you think in the comments. Spacesuits are critical pieces of spaceflight hardware, as any mission where you want your crew to be able to go outside will require them. They're some of the most personal items you can find, with every little detail measured precisely to an astronaut's body shape. They're also essentially miniature spaceships for a person, which means they're also really expensive. A system NASA has been using to make expensive things cheaper is by outsourcing to private companies, which they've done with commercial crew and commercial cargo, seeing Crew Dragon and Starliner fly to the space station, as well as Cargo Dragon, Cygnus, and in the future Cargo Dream Chaser. This has been working out rather well, so they're going to do the same thing with spacesuits. The companies awarded with the contract are Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, who will each be developing their own suits. $3.5 billion US dollars have been awarded for all of the development, which is split between the two companies. Now, that might sound like a rather large sum, but if the money is split evenly, that's $1.75 billion each. That figure has also spread over the next 12 years, leading to an average $145 million per year per company. The new contract also comes with a cool name, XEVAs, or the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services. Axiom and Collins will develop their own XEVAs suits with NASA effectively renting them from the companies. The first suits required for use on the moon are going to be required for use in 2025, as that date is the current date for the Artemis III mission, the first moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. These companies will also be developing a suit for use in zero-gravity environments such as the International Space Station. The American suits, which are used on spacewalks, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit are a 41-year-old design, first being introduced in 1981 for use on the ISS and during space shuttle missions. These replacements are expected to be introduced in the mid-2020s for testing alongside the gravity suits, which will be tested first in zero-G. Space station suits are also very useful for Axiom space, who have had requests from future customers for a spacewalk during their trip to Axiom space station when it is constructed. Collins Aero space is inheriting previous experience with the EMU suits on the ISS and the A7L suits used on Apollo as they now own Hamilton's sun strand and they'll be working with ILC Dover. The former manufactured the helmet, communications cap, locking rings and more hard components for the EMUs, as well as the helmet, locking rings and life support backpack for the A7Ls and the latter manufactured the soft components on the EMU suits such as the arms. If you cast your mind back a little bit, NASA had originally planned to develop their own suits internally called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit. A demo was shown off, which nobody really liked the livery of. If you believe there is only one positive from this contract, I hope that this is it, that this horrible design will not be making it into space. Speaking of designs, the actual technical details of the suits being developed haven't been released yet, so we still have to wait a little while for that. We have official dates-ish on the first flight of Ariane Space's new rocket, Vegasy and Ariane 6. Vegasy's debut mission is currently slated for the first week of July, which is in just three weeks time. This launch will be the company's second of the year, following an Ariane 5 mission on June 22nd, carrying MESAT 3D and GSAT 24. We don't know what will be flying on the inaugural Vegasy flight yet, but I'm sure we'll find that out relatively soon. Ariane 6, Europe's new heavy lift rocket is now scheduled for debut towards the end of the year, which tightens the previous window stated from the second half of 2022. Vivian Quenette, the managing director and head of sales for the Asia-Pacific region at Ariane Space, has said that with Ariane 6 and Vegasy now coming on line soon, their backlog of missions that were scheduled to fly on Soyuz should now have something to fly on. If you are unaware, Ariane Space can no longer fly the Soyuz due to Russia pulling engineers out of French Guyana in retaliation for the European Union sanctions, which was in retaliation for their invasion and subsequent ongoing war with Ukraine. Both Ariane 6 and Vegasy will provide capacity upgrades for those existing customers in the backlog and new ones, with Ariane seeing an upgrade of 10.8 metric tons, nearly a two-times increase to Leo, and Vegas seeing an upgrade of 700 kilos to a sun-synchronous orbit, an increase of nearly 50%. Of course, with all this hype about Europe's new heavy lift rocket, we should talk about NASA's new heavy lift rocket, which has just rolled out of the VAB as of Monday, the 6th of June. On track for its second round of attempts at a wet dress rehearsal, the upgrades and updates by NASA in the VAB and air liquid, just down the road on Merritt Island, should give us a better chance at success. First motion was seen at 04.15 UTC, early in the morning on Monday, which you can tell is a really convenient time for anyone wanting to watch the rollout in the UK. After a 4.2-mile road trip down the Crawler 8 to Launch Complex 39B, the big orange rocket was jacked up onto the mount, which holds the mobile platform in place, allowing the crawler to crawl away down the Crawler Way. We still have a little while to wait until actual tanking gets underway, but save the date, as in just two Sundays' time, the big orange rocket is going for round two. Lockheed Martin and ABL Space Systems had planned to first launch from the UK this year, but that has now slipped to next year due to quote-unquote launch vehicle and spaceport maturation, as well as waiting for a launch license to be approved. It also hasn't really helped that ABL's RS1 rocket has been suffering its own delays as well, however the maiden launch of that vehicle is now slated for summer of this year, which, according to Google, is right around the corner. The president of ABL, Dan Pymont, has said that the company would also like to see multiple successful launches of the rocket from the United States before they ship one over to the UK for a launch from the Saxavod spaceport on the Shetland Islands, which could see their first launch from the UK push even further if their launch cadence isn't very high. With Astra's announcement a couple weeks ago that they'll be launching it from Saxavod in 2023, the competition for the country's first vertical launch from home soil is really starting to heat up. But wait, there's more. Orbex is a launch company based in the UK who've just announced that they're going to be launching their Prime rocket advertised as using renewable fuel which can cut carbon emissions by 90% at the end of this year or at the start of 2023, which means that if those dates hold up, next year could be a busy one for debut flights from one country. Orbex's problems are similar to ABL and Lockheed's problems with the availability of the spaceport and a launch license still being worked on by the Civil Aviation Authority. It's important to note, however, that Orbex will not be launching from Saxavod. They'll be launching from Space Hub Sutherland, which is on mainland Great Britain. This could be a big factor in whether or not Prime will be the first vertically launched rocket from UK soil as the different spaceports are naturally being constructed at different rates. If Sutherland is ready first, that gives Orbex a solid lead. If Saxavod is ready first, that gives ABL and Astra a solid lead. If they're finished at roughly the same time, then everyone remains equal. The race is getting exciting at this point and personally, I can't wait for launches to finally commence within the United Kingdom. A company which, since the dawn of spaceflight, has essentially had to rely on other nations, excluding one successful orbital launch from Australia in 1971 of the Black Arrow. We're now going to take a look at some launches which happened a little more recently than the 1970s, which are the launches from the last seven days. Firstly, we have the launch of nine low-earth orbit communications satellites for Group 1 of the Geely Constellation, designed for testing autonomous driving. These launched atop a Long March 2C at 0400 UTC on the 2nd of June from Launch Complex 3 at the Xi Chang Satellite Launch Centre in China. If you haven't heard of Geely before, you certainly have, just in the form of their global subsidiaries such as Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, and the London Electric Vehicle Company, who manufacture the capital's famous black cabs. We then had the first of two space station flights. The first was cargo resupply progress MS-20. It launched at 0932 Coordinated Universal Time on the 3rd of June from Site 316 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on top of a Soyuz 2.1A. A classic Soyuz speedrun followed, and I know that progress is different, but progress speedrun sounds worse, with the spacecraft docking to the Zvezda module on the International Space Station at 1303 UTC, just three hours and 31 minutes later. On board was 2,500kg of payload made up of 599kg of fuel, 420kg of water, and 40kg of oxygen. The rest is dry cargo, which includes four CubeSats to be deployed during an EVA, and a 3D printer. The second space station launch came in the form of Shenzhou 14, the latest in Chinese-proved flights. Launched against 0244 UTC on June 5th from Launch Area 4 at the Zheguan Satellite Launch Centre in China, their only human-capable pad, which we know of, we were told who was on board. The commander of the mission is Chen Dong, who is starting off their second space flight alongside Operator Lu Yang. They flew first on Shenzhou 11 and Shenzhou 9 respectively. They were also joined by Operator Kai Xu-Jie, who is a spaceflight rookie. They docked to the Nadir port on Tyane at 0942 the same day, marking the start to their sixth-month stay on the station, where they'll see the arrival of two new science modules, Wentian and Montian. Once those modules are moved to their appropriate docking ports, Tyane Gong will then become the second place in space with a continuous human presence. Tomorrow, June 8th, we have Nilesat 301 on a Falcon 9. We then have an Astroflight with Tropics 1 and 2, and then Capstone on Electron. If you want to do a little more than subscribing, then becoming a citizen of tomorrow is one of the best ways to financially contribute to the show. The escape velocity, orbital-sub-orbital-angle-round support citizens each contribute differing levels once a month to help upkeep Station 204 and with their generosity come perks such as seeing script as they're being written, access to exclusive Discord channels and much more. 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