 Hello citizens of earth and welcome to station 204. It's me Jared and I'll be bringing you your space news for October 2nd 2019. Now as you can imagine SpaceX's Starship announcement is going to be basically the meat of what we're going to be talking about on this news episode today. But first we are going to go over to our space traffic report because we've got some launches and arrivals. Much like last week we're starting off in China at the Xikon Space Center where a Long March 2D carried the Yunhai 102 satellite off the launch pad on September 25th at 052 Universal Time. Successfully delivered to a polar orbit, Yunhai 102 will be used for study of the atmospheric, marine and space environments as well as disaster management and other scientific experiments. From the steps of Kazakhstan a fresh batch of astronauts were hoisted into orbit aboard Soyuz MS-15 leaving at 1357 and 42 seconds Universal Time on September 25th by a Russian Soyuz FG rocket. A now standard four-orbit rendezvous with the International Space Station occurred with the spacecraft arriving at 1942 Universal Time. On board were three astronauts Commander Oleg Scripochka, Flight Engineer Jessica Meir and the first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, Hazaa Ali Almansoori. This brings the station's crew up to nine aboard which is the highest it has been since the end of the shuttle program. Lifting off from the Plastics Cosmodrome on September 26th at 0746 Universal Time, a Soyuz 2-1B rocket carried an unidentified payload for the Russian Defense Ministry successfully into orbit. Based on tracking data indicating an unusual elliptical monia orbit with a perigee of 1,645 kilometers and an apogee of 38,536 kilometers, observers speculate that it's an EKS missile early warning satellite. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's 8th H-2 transfer vehicle successfully docked with the International Space Station at 1112 Universal Time on September 28th. On board is 3,777 kilograms of supplies, equipment and experiments, most notably new lithium batteries to upgrade the ISS current old nickel hydrogen ones and parts to help fix the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer II instrument. No departures or arrivals this week. Earth, I'm quite disappointed in you. We've been waiting quite a while to hear from Elon Musk as to what's going on with Starship and also get an update about that launch system that's supposed to help make us a multi-planetary species. Well, we can stop waiting because we now know some new information. So let's head on down to Texas where there's a nice shiny new spaceship to talk about. Back in 2016, we were first acquainted with the interplanetary transport system. This was the first proposal for a large-scale reusable rocket and spacecraft. But a little too ambitious out of the gates, things were scaled down when we met Big Falcon rocket and Big Falcon spaceship in 2017. Then in 2018, updates came during the hashtag DearMoon event with Starship beginning to look like the vehicle we're becoming familiar with today. But that vehicle sitting at Boca Chica today and what's being assembled at the Cape right now, they're not going to be what's flying when the destination moves to low Earth orbit and beyond. You see, they're both prototypes. Elon said that the specific prototype at Boca Chica, known as Starship Mark I, could go up on a 20 kilometer test flight before the end of the year. As for what Mark II at the Cape will get up to, expect similar flight profiles to Starship Mark I, but most certainly pushing the envelope. Now during his presentation, Elon did say that Starship Mark III would be the one that would start the orbital test flights. And then just a few minutes later, he said it was actually going to be Mark IV and then just a few minutes later, Mark V. So as to which one is actually going to start the orbital test flights, we have no idea. And in fact, we don't even know which timeline of Elon time we're contending with at the moment as well. And yes, I know some of you were a bit peeved at me for my mention of Elon time in our last space news, but let me concede that watching Star Hopper and Starship Mark I being built at the breakneck speed they have been, along with the absolute absurdity of them being built outdoors within complete view of anyone driving past is just amazing. I'm a bit skeptical that the outside building bit is something that will occur with the actual Starship vehicles in the future beyond these prototypes, but SpaceX may prove me wrong, which is something I happily enjoy. But what about the really technical stuff and also all of the changes that happen in Starship? Well, Elon was happy to throw down the nitty gritty all about it. Probably the most shocking change with Starship was the move from the original material, carbon composites, to 301 stainless steel. Now this is not the same stainless steel your sleek modern refrigerator in your kitchen uses. The net effect is that a 301 stainless steel rocket is actually the lightest possible reusable architecture. I didn't know that. Because at cryogenic temperatures a 301 stainless actually has about the same effective strength as an advanced composite or aluminum lithium. Unlike most steels which get brittle at low temperature, 301 stainless gets much stronger. And if it's in the extra-hard condition, meaning it's cold rolled to extra-hard condition, it also gets way stronger. It actually gets its strength to waste ratio at cryogenic temperatures is equivalent or even perhaps slightly better than advanced composites or aluminum lithium. That's super cool, literally. It's $130,000 a ton for the carbon fiber and $2,500 a ton for the steel. So the steel is about 2% of the cost of the carbon fiber. 150th the cost? 150th the cost? Holy moly, that is a very good reason to be completely impressed with stainless steel beyond just the cryogenic ability and the heatability and all the other things that they can do. But a lot of people were saying that this was sort of like a new age of rockets to make them out of stainless steel. And I'm here to let you know that actually stainless steel in rockets, that's been around for a very long time. The Atlas Centaur rocket going all the way back to 1962 had stainless steel construction. And the modern Centaur that flies as the second stage of Atlas Vs, those still use stainless steel as well. Now that's some pretty good heritage if you ask me. And that's why we've got WD-40 originally created in order to prevent corrosion on those Atlas rockets. Now I wonder what kind of magical compounds we're going to get out of Starship and all the chemicals they're going to be using for it. Oh and there's also Starship's heat shield. The ultimately we decided to have a heat shield hexagonal tiles, ceramic tiles that are basically like a tiny glass vermicelli at a microstructure level. Very light, but very crack resistant, essentially glass tiles. Oh yeah, I've seen this before. You see the Space Shuttle's thermal protection system used borosilicate glass on the high temperature reusable surface insulation tiles, those black ones on its bottom. Now those could handle up to 1260 Celsius. So again, pretty good heritage and SpaceX has already started to test these tiles as if you flew on SpaceX's CRS-18 missions dragon. Now propulsion is kind of important, so what's Starship got under the hood? Or in this case I guess what's under its skirt? Or what's powering its bottom? Wait, none of this is sounding good. The ship will have a total of six engines, three of the sea level variety of Raptor, and those are actually on the rocket right now. So we have the three sea level, in fact that's a picture of just inside that skirt, that's what it looks like. Aspirationally the target is a 380 second ISP for the vacuum engine. This is a very, in sort of space geek terms, this is like really a great number. That'll be extremely impressive if they can get three atmospheric Raptors to 350 seconds of specific impulse, same for the three vacuum Raptors at 380 seconds. And smart to use liquid methane and liquid oxygen. You can find those all over the solar system in the form of water and hydrocarbons and you can make your fuel there, so you don't have to take your fuel with you. But there is one place that you do have to take your fuel to Earth orbit so that way you can depart it to your destination. But another key step is refilling on orbit so that the Starship can get to orbit with let's say 150 tons of payload for the Moon or Mars or beyond, and then it can get tankered to fill up its propellant tanks and so it can depart from low Earth orbit with 1200 tons of propellant. That's going to be astonishing and I can't wait to see what the transfer of cryogenic fluids is like with a system this simple. Now we know on orbit refueling is possible as back in 1984 on Shuttle mission STS-41G an experiment was conducted and proven successful to see the feasibility of in-space refueling. And of course an experiment on the outside of the International Space Station known as the Robotic Refueling Mission performed tests between 2011 to 2013 to learn more about in-space propellant transfer. And having a full fuel tank is pretty important if you want to make us a multi-planetary species. You're going to want to make sure that you can take the maximum payload with you wherever you're going and for Starship it can lift 150 tons. And mind you that's chucking 150 tons of payload in its reusable configuration both to the Moon and Mars. Holy smokes and of course the SpaceX signature of reusability ain't going to be going away but what is going to crank up is the rapidness of that reuse. So when I say rapid reusability I mean you know you you can fly it like you can fly the booster 20 times a day you fly the ship three or four times a day that's what I mean by reusability. Now that's a really tough one because flying a rocket 20 times a day that's going to be pretty darn hard. Although if what was floated in 2017 that proposal to use the spacecraft for point-to-point travel across the earth well there you go there's your testing regime. Now there are some things that still need to be thought of like life support. I think for sure you'd want to have a regenerative life support system so that just means you're recycling everything you know that's for sure important if you're on a several month journey to Mars and then you know on the surface for 18 months regenerative is kind of a necessity. So I don't think it's actually super hard to do that relative to the the spacecraft itself the life support system is pretty straightforward. Now I'm very skeptical of a regenerative life support system being pretty straightforward. Environmental control and life support systems are not something to hand wave especially if you're making a system that could potentially be used by Starship's maximum crew capacity of 100 people. The International Space Station's life support systems require quite a lot of maintenance but if anyone can make something amazing happen I have high confidence SpaceX can so we'll just have to wait on this one. Overall if Star Hopper is anything to go by the test flights of Starship coming up are going to be epic spectacular and mind-blowingly awesome. A first orbital flight could occur in 2020 and potentially the entire rocket super heavy being the first stage and Starship being the upper stage could occur by 2021 but of course Elon time so we'll have to see. Now this has really been something else I cannot recall at any time the amount of transparency that we've been seeing in the development of a spaceship and a rocket like we have with Starship and super heavy and I also don't recall at any time seeing the amount of pressure from the engineering community or pop culture that we're seeing being put on Starship right now before it begins its test flights and it's still an unknown there's a very high risk that this may actually not end up working out like SpaceX is expecting it to but if there's anyone who can do it it's SpaceX they're very nimble they know exactly what to do and they can persevere so it may just happen in the history of spaceflight that a little unassuming field right next to a beach in Texas could be our gateway to the stars. And now with this week's space weather let's hand it over to Dr. Tamatha Scoop. Space weather this week continues to calm down a bit from that big solar storm that we had last week that brought Aurora down to the mid-latitudes but just barely as we switch to our front side sun you can see that big coronal hole rotating off of the sun's west limb that's the coronal hole that brought us the fast one that gave us the solar storm but guess what we have yet another coronal hole in the middle of the disk right now that one in the southern hemisphere is going to be rotating into the earth strike zone here in the next couple days and it could get us up to about active conditions but I doubt it's going to bump us to solar storm levels now also if we look at the very far the east limb you can also see a bright region rotating into earth view this region has been giving a little bit of pop pop pop with the little tiny solar flares here and there but nothing too substantial as we switch to our backside sun you can actually see that it's actually been part of a whole cluster of active regions as a matter of fact we had two active regions that ended up fizzling out before they rotated into earth view and then a whole cluster of other ones came into view but this one has managed to stay robust it's now gotten a new designation so we have a sun spot on the earth facing sun and it's no longer a spotless sun it has boosted the solar flux just a little bit but not enough to get us into marginal radio propagation just yet but we are watching it and now for your leo meo geo orbit outlook you can imagine with this big solar storm that we're coming down from it's kind of left the near earth environment a bit rattled as we switch to our low energy particle environment these are the particles that can cause surface charging on the surface of the spacecraft including the solar arrays that then can discharge and cause shorts and all sorts of electrical disturbances you can see around the 28th and 29th the fluxes in and around the geo orbits really start building up and they kind of swirl around and last for a few days before things begin to really quiet down and they get flushed so the satellite operators the surface charging is an issue for you especially around the geo orbits for more details on this week's space weather including when and where to see aurora and what that new bright region is doing come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com thanks for watching this edition of tomorrow space news now of course don't forget about our live shows that we have every saturday and this saturday october 5th at 1800 universal time you're going to want to tune in because we have hank rogers the founder of the international moon base alliance this is a group ranging a white number of disciplines all aimed at the singular goal of making a moon base possible now with all the talk of returning to the moon and commercial companies aiming for it this is one that you won't want to miss and of course we want to thank all of the patrons of tomorrow without your help we would not be able to do these shows so if you've got something out of this show and you'd like to give something back you can head on over to patreon.com slash tmro or youtube.com slash tmro slash join and you can give as little as a dollar per month if you'd like another way to support the show you can hit the subscribe button hit the bell notification at the top and you're probably going to want to do that anyhow we've been having a lot of letting off steams lately and those have been fun and you definitely want to catch those live so until the next space news keep exploring now during his presentation lifting off from the please sticks please stick plus it's ah this is some hard stuff planetary species so let's quit talking about it and let's let's quit talking let's quit talking about it