 Hello and welcome to tomorrow news, now this week is going to be particularly interesting because Ryan is going to be talking about the last of the dragons and I'm going to be going through a large number of very quick stories sort of like a little spaceflight bonanza if you will. Now of course before we get started I just want to remind you that if you really like us here tomorrow don't forget to subscribe also watch this video and if you like it hit like also feel free to comment share this everywhere you can. So let's stop waiting around let's go ahead and get this started with tomorrow news for April 16th 2020. It's the end of an era for SpaceX as the final flight of their Dragon 1 spacecraft sadly concluded this Tuesday thrashing down at approximately 1850 coordinated universal time with around 1800 kilograms of cargo on board. This was the 21st flight of the Dragon 1 vehicle and the 20th to the International Space Station. The conclusion of this mission also marked the end of the CRS-1 contract SpaceX had from NASA to resupply the ISS. However this isn't the end of Dragon supplying the ISS with cargo as in 2016 NASA awarded three companies being Orbital ATK, now Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, Sierra Nevada Corporation and SpaceX the commercial resupply to contract. SpaceX's first of six scheduled missions will hopefully be commencing in October of this year with the new cargo variant of the Dragon 2 spacecraft. The Dragon 2 capsule is also the vehicle that SpaceX will be using to take astronauts to and from the ISS as a part of the commercial crew program which should be having its first flight with Doug Hurley and Bob Benkin in around one month's time and I am hoping that the whole Covid-19 situation does not prevent this launch as I am so excited about this launch and the successive manned launches after it. It is about time that humans should launch from US soil again as it has been almost nine years since the last space shuttle launch in 2011 and I am not saying that a gap in human spaceflight is good here but it has been roughly the same amount of time between the final shuttle flight and now as it was the gap between the final Saturn V flight and the first shuttle flight. But all of this Dragon news has not slowed down the development of Starship SN4 as a lot of progress has been made with new skirting sections being made and the engine section from SN3 being salvaged, flipped around and being prepared so it is ready for SN4 testing. There are so many exciting projects happening at SpaceX at the moment that this is really keeping my spirits up during these hard times and hopefully it can keep yours up as well. I'll be back next week but for the time being I'll hand it back over to Jared. Thanks for the update Ryan, always great to have some positives coming out of the time like now and if you're looking at the spaceflight industry and saying well there's not really a lot going on, rest assured there actually is so it is time for a classic Jared space story showdown rodeo yee-ha gyan it and if you can think of anything better to call it be my guest tell me what I should call it. With a dire need for supplies due to the Covid-19 pandemic many spaceflight companies are stepping up and helping produce with SpaceX Blue Origin and Virgin Orbit developing and building ventilators, face shields and even United Launch Alliance's CEO Tory Bruno getting in on the action 3D printing manifolds and face shields at home. Operations still continue on the International Space Station where astronauts Oleg Skripochka, Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan are scheduled to return from this Friday April 17th in Soyuz MS-15. Skripochka and Meir have been on station for 7 months, Morgan has been on station for 9 months. A huge congratulations to one of our favorite space companies and frequent guests we have here on tomorrow, Nastin Space Systems. They've been awarded a $75 million contract to deliver scientific payloads for NASA on their XL1 lander. This is being done as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. The current plan is to launch XL1 in 2022 aiming for a landing at the moon's south pole, which if successful would make it the first vehicle to land at the moon's poles. Now NASA has reserved 80 kilograms of payload for scientific instruments. And of course we could ask Dave Mastin if he can talk about it, but I'm not going to talk a whole lot about what the details are, but we've got a bunch of stuff that I just cannot talk about. There's some details I don't want to get into. The Progress Rocket Space Center, where Russian Soyuz rockets are built, announced it was halting production amid the global slowdown. Only three of a planned 21 launches were done for the OneWeb satellite internet constellation before they declared bankruptcy. So the Progress Rocket Space Center says that they have 40 rockets in storage and 12 at various spaceports awaiting flights. Virgin Orbit is now one step closer to the inaugural launch of Launcher 1, or should it be described as the one launch of the Virgin Orbit inaugural? Anyways, the modified 747 Cosmic Girl took off from the Mojave spaceport with Launcher 1 in its port side pylon, fully loaded with RP-1 fuel and cryogenic nitrogen. A complete beginning-to-end test of launch was conducted, no word yet from Virgin Orbit as to when that inaugural flight will be, but we're hoping pretty soon. And to wrap up some great news coming out of Rocket Lab, where they performed a successful test of the parachute helicopter recovery system for electrons' reusability. Rocket Lab is working to recover and reuse their first stages to increase their launch cadence. Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, said the earliest they expect to attempt this is on Flight 17, which the mission that is presently delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic is Flight 12, so it's a bit of a ways to go. But hey, more time for them to work on it. And we actually had some launches and traffic in the past week, so let's go ahead and get to it. Starting off at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a Soyuz 2.1A rocket lofted Soyuz MS-16 carrying three astronauts, Anatoly Ivanishin, Ivan Wagner and Chris Cassidy. Lift-off was on time at 0805 Universal April 9th. Of note, the Soyuz 2.1A booster is a new configuration of the Soyuz rocket, including upgraded digital flight control systems. The vehicle performed flawlessly, and we got some pretty cool views of that third stage shutting down at separation. Six orbits later, Soyuz MS-16 arrived at the International Space Station docking at 1413 Universal Time April 9th. Hatch is open, and the ISS is now up to a six-astronaut crew. At 1146 Universal on April 9th, the Long March 3B rocket lifted off from the Zhishang Space Center to deliver an Indonesian communications satellite, Palapa M1, to a geostationary transfer orbit. But that didn't happen! Several videos taken in Guam showed debris coming back in through the Earth's atmosphere, and China announced that the launch had failed. Now, this is China's second launch failure in a month, with a Long March 17A rocket having failed on March 16th. And here are your upcoming launches. Space weather this week is definitely calming down at least as far as solar flux goes. As we switch to our front-side sun, we had a couple bright regions at high latitudes that began to fade a little bit as they rotated into Earthview, and then we had a couple mid-latitude bright regions that thought they were promising, and then they began to fade, and now we're back to a completely spotless sun, which is too bad because it looks like solar flux might actually dip back into the high 60s for the first time in probably months. So it doesn't look like we're getting much in the way of radio propagation on Earth's day side for amateur radio operators and emergency responders. However, we do have a solar storm that looks like it's been launched just to the east of Earth, and you can't really see it on the front-side view, but as we switch to our far-side view, and this is Stereo A, and it's looking at the sun from the side, you can see on the west limb, you can see those bright regions that I talked about that were rotating into Earthview, and you can watch them kind of fade very rapidly, sadly. But right around the 15th, you can see just a little bit of puff of something, and it's actually much more visible if we switch to our coronagraph view right around the late on the 14th and early into the 15th. You can see it on that side, on the west side of the sun kind of lifting off there, that big kind of smokering. That is a solar storm, and it looks like it might be partially Earth-directed. We're waiting for models to confirm this, but if so, we could expect maybe a wispy impact sometime around the 19th or 20th. We could reach maybe active conditions for all your roar photographers. Switching to our moon, we are now passing through the third quarter phase on our way to a new moon, with the new moon being on the 22nd. So you night sky watchers, now's a chance to get those really dim objects in the sky, and it's perfect timing for potentially that solar storm that looks like it might be hitting around the 19th and the 20th, and for the Lyrid meteor shower, which should peak on the 22nd. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see a roar, if that solar storm that's coming might hit us, and how emergency and amateur radio might be impacted, check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Now the last thing I'm going to talk about in this week's episode of Tomorrow News is something that's essentially just a hey look at this cool thing that happened, because on April 10th the European Space Agency's Beppi Colombo probe did a flyby of the Earth for gravity assist on its way to Mercury. Now the probe came within 12,700 kilometers of the Earth, using the gravity of the Earth itself to slow down, which will plunge it deeper into the inner solar system, and as it did, it took these epic photos of the Earth as it went past. That is some pretty amazing detail that's got right there. Now this is Beppi Colombo's only flyby of the Earth, but it has two additional flybys of Venus and six flybys of Mercury before it will attempt orbital entry around Mercury in 2025. The getting to Mercury is ridiculously difficult, because you're slipping deep into the gravitational influence of the Sun. So absurd trajectories like the one you're seeing here are how you do it. But those images going past our planet, wow man, always wonderful to see things like that, a reminder of where we are. And to wrap up this week's news, I just want to thank all of you who helped contribute to the shows of tomorrow. We really can't do this without you, and each and every one of you who does this, you are pretty darn amazing, I gotta say, and it's greatly appreciated. So if you want to contribute to the shows of tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash T M R O slash join to do so and check out all the great rewards that we have available to you at different levels of support. Of course, watching the shows, liking, subscribing, setting up those notifications and sharing us everywhere you can is an incredible help as well. And that's Miko for this week's tomorrow news. Thank you so much for joining us. Stay healthy, stay well. And until the next one, remember, keep exploring.