 Hey what's up everybody welcome to tomorrow. So there's a lot of different updates that we need to talk about regarding NASA's commercial cargo and commercial crew programs and that's what we're going to be discussing for this your space pod from November 10th 2015. So to give a little back history NASA has a program called Commercial Resupply Services which falls under the commercial cargo program and under that contract they contracted SpaceX and Orbital Sciences now Orbital ATK to send up cargo to the International Space Station. Last October Orbital Sciences suffered a failure in their Antares rocket and the investigation report for that accident has been released. It was determined that one of the turbopumps on one of the engines did explode which caused more explosions and the chain reaction was the rocket failing and disintegrating. However the reason for why that turbopump exploded has yet to be found so hopefully that just with the new engines and new tooling that they're going to be using hopefully they won't have an accident like this in the future. SpaceX also suffered a failure of their Falcon 9 rocket on their last attempt to send cargo to the space station. An investigation for that is still ongoing although the reasons for why that launch failed are fairly understood at this point. SpaceX has been doing a lot of work to return the Falcon 9 to flight and they've been doing lots of test firings at their new test stand in McGregor, Texas but beyond that they're also going to be having the new more powerful version of the Falcon 9 rocket flying and so there's lots of different certification that needs to go into that on top of this being a return to flight mission. It won't take place earlier than November 30th probably December might even get pushed into January so all of us have got our fingers crossed for that mission and hopefully everything goes well when it takes place. But NASA has another program for the commercial resupply services. This is the second round of competition to send up cargo to the space station aptly called CRS-2 for commercial resupply services too. For this second round only five companies were seriously being considered as being able to actually send cargo up to the space station. These companies were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation with their Dream Chaser Spaceplane, SpaceX and Orbital ATK. Lockheed Martin was dropped from the competition and will no longer be considered for CRS-2 and judging on the idea that they had for their plan it really wasn't much of a surprise. Boeing has also been dropped from the competition. There was supposed to be an announcement this past week as to who the winners were going to be for the second round of the competition and NASA announced that that was going to be pushed back and they will not announce the winners until sometime in January, at least now that's the current announcement date. Could be pushed back even more. But it's not all bad for Boeing because they are already one of the contenders in the commercial crew program and not only would they be sending up crew to the space station but on every mission they would also have some cargo on board as well and at any time they could modify a capsule to have cargo only in some sort of emergency situation. So all is well with Boeing and their CST-100 Starliner so that's all good for them even though they didn't win this round. SpaceX seems like an obvious choice since they already have a lot of the hardware in place and as long as everything goes well with their return to flight of the Falcon 9 then they should be in a great position to win that contract. With Orbital ATK they have already flown a bunch of missions up to the International Space Station and at least as far as their Cygnus cargo freighter is concerned it is a good spacecraft and hopefully they will be able to continue flights of it. But as far as their Antares rocket is concerned they do have this new deal with United Launch Alliance to send up the Cygnus cargo freighter on Atlas V rockets instead of the Antares. There's not really any clear shot as to when the Antares might be returning to flight if ever there is that possibility that might not ever fly again so Orbital ATK although they are in a good position also are in a really weird position right now as well but I'm hoping that they do win the contract as well. But probably the company I'm rooting for the most is Sierra Nevada Corporation that would be awesome if they were able to get the seed money to continue development on their Dream Chaser space plane. Sure for this cargo version it would be a cargo only version rather an unmanned version of their space plane but you would be able to return sensitive experiments back to anywhere on the world if you wanted to so I'm really rooting for them and hope that the Dream Chaser does fly someday even if it is in an unmanned cargo variant so I'm really rooting for Dream Chaser. Anyway this is all very exciting news and I definitely want to know what you guys think about this whole commercial resupply services round two. What do you think about Lockheedon Boeing being dropped from the competition already and of the three companies remaining which one are you rooting for the most? Leave a comment and let us know what your favorite team is so far. Also if you are willing and able please consider contributing to our Patreon campaign so that we can continue to make space news videos like this. You can find out more information at patreon.com slash spacepod and thank you so much to everyone who's been contributing so far. It really does go a long way so thank you so much to everyone you guys are the best audience ever. Well that's going to be it for this video thank you very much for watching my name is Michael Clark and hopefully you know a little bit more today than you did yesterday thanks to tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.