 SpaceX are getting closer to a static fire of Booster 7 at Starbase. There's been a strange sight with their recovery operations and Virgin Galactic have chosen who will build their new mother ships. This is tomorrow's Space News. Ship 24 has finally made its way to the launch site for what we hope to be the final time before SpaceX pushes on with the orbital flight test. It's had a touch-up to the livery with the outline of the starbrick thermal tiles being painted black to make the edges a bit straighter, as well as the SpaceX logo and S24 being added to the top of the nose cone. These aesthetic touch-ups really start to make Ship 24 feel like a proper spaceship capable of going to space rather than just the test article made of stainless steel rings. It gives a bit more flavour to the ship. The positioning of S24 is also very reminiscent of the placement of the names on the space shuttles. The following day at sunrise, the starship was lifted from the transport stand, which carried it to the launch site and placed onto Suborbital Pad B. It isn't going to be making any suborbital flights, though. The suborbital mounts are purely just ground testing facilities now for SpaceX. Booster 7 has been testing several times yet again over the past week on the orbital launch mount at Starbase. No frost is visible here, but it has been venting. There's also been another igniter test. Just like Falcon 9, Super Heavy will steer itself in the denser parts of the atmosphere with four grid fins, which SpaceX have been testing as well. Just to note, this video has sped up. They move a little slower in real time. Booster 8's thrust puck has been flipped over in preparation for the final assembly of the Super Heavy Booster. And speaking of final assembly, the Booster's forward section, featuring the top tank and the holes for the grid fins, has been rolled into High Bay 2, also known as the Megabay, to join the aft section. I'm assuming these sections were stacked together later on, as the forward section was lifted by the bridge crane to the correct height for a stack and then pulled out of view of Nick Anciwini's camera. Remember that thrust puck? 33 Raptor 2s are needed to fill up the slots, and two more have been delivered to Starbase. Following a visit from some engineering teams, the chopsticks have been tested again after the lift of Booster 7. They've raised themselves to the top of the tower before opening up and coming back down. One of the huge actuators, which powers the chopsticks, has also been removed whilst other upgrades are taking place, making them inoperable for the time being. Oh, and what a coincidence, a brand new actuator arrived on a flatbed truck just a little while later. It's likely SpaceX will be replacing the old actuator with this new one as it looks exactly the same. To reach the Raptors under the Super Heavy Boosters, once they're on the launch mount, the engineers need a platform to stand on. This is a new one, which has been built for them, with wings which can fold out to allow more working space. The LR-11000 crane, which is at the launch site, has been moved away from the suborbital pad, which could be for two reasons. The boring reason is that they want to lift one of the test tanks, and the exciting reason is it could be a protective measure in preparation for a ship static fire. SpaceX have also submitted new filings to the Federal Communications Commission, not the FAA, as they want to put Starlink on the ship and Booster for the orbital test flight. This, according to SpaceX, will reduce the blackouts during re-entry, and it also means we should see some clear views from the ship and Booster. The ship will reach around 250km in altitude before returning to Earth and then doing a simulated landing on the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. The Booster, on the other hand, has two options, a full catch attempt on the chopsticks, or a landing stroke splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Moving on from the Star ship to the Starlink, there's a bit of a battle going on right now in the US surrounding the 12GHz spectrum, as satellite TV provided this network, as well as some other companies and interest groups, disagree with SpaceX's stance on the issue. This wants to access the 12GHz spectrum for Terrestrial 5G, but, according to SpaceX, it did severely disrupt Starlink services, as they, along with OneWeb and some other satellite operators, used the band for connecting to user terminals. According to Dish, SpaceX's study on the matter is, and I quote, scientifically analogically flawed, with data being taken from an area which is among the most unfavourable geographies to analyse interference. SpaceX said back in June that if the FCC allowed high-power mobile services to operate within the 12GHz band, that Starlink would become unusable for most Americans, with a complete outage of 74% of the time. The 5G for 12GHz coalition hit back at that by saying it's just not true, and it is spreading an anti-5G narrative, which is harmful for American consumers. So, SpaceX's study says that Starlink would be unusable to the majority of Americans, so what does the 5G for 12GHz coalition have to back up their side of the story? They're counting on a study commissioned by RS Access, a spectrum-holding company which concluded that yes, the 1% of terminals used by non-geostationary satellite operators would be interfered with by a nationwide 5G network. SpaceX, obviously, said that the conclusion to that study was incorrect. You can make your own mind up on who you think is right and who you think is wrong, as both SpaceX and Dish network have argued their own sides of the story. What's the outcome then? The FCC has said that Dish network and RS Access's argument against the approval for SpaceX has not prejudged their decision. In other words, their decision is probably not going to be swayed anytime soon. Oh, and as we talked about on the live show, Starlink has launched their new maritime service. It's priced at US$10,000 for the kit, and then another 5K a month for the subscription, which may seem like a lot of money and it is for a single user like you and me, but this service, just like Starlink Business, isn't designed for a single user like you and me. It's designed for huge container ships and oil tankers with hundreds of crew, but of course it'll work on any boat you put it on. According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the company was paying US$150,000 a month for the connection to their maritime assets through a very small aperture terminal service. Starlink maritime will be a big saving with similar looking dishes which are made more rugged and stronger to survive the harsh conditions of choppy salty seas. Virgin Galactic have asked Aurora Flight Sciences to construct their next two mother ships, which are the carrier aircraft which bring the spaceship up to the drop altitude. Currently, the only carrier ship in operation is White Knight 2, but it should have a sibling in 2025. There have been no numbers disclosed by Virgin, but a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission has confirmed that there are incentives for Aurora if they complete the planes on time. As well as the two new planes, Aurora will also deliver a static test article for structural integrity tests. The new planes should be ready around the same time as the new Delta-class spaceships, the evolution after spaceship 3. That is about all the information we are being told at the moment about the next generation of mother ships which are planned to be easier to maintain and integral to the scaling up of operations with more tourist flights into the latter half of the 2020s. Their current mother ship, White Knight 2, was constructed by Scaled Composites back in 2008, the same company who built ROC, Stratto Launcher's Carrier Aircraft. And with that, it's time for some space traffic. The first launch to cover is this Soyuz 2.1B which lifted off at O918 Coordinated Universal Time on the 7th of July from site 43.4 at the Pozzette Cosmodrome in northern Russia. On board was the 935kg GLONASS K1 No.16 satellite, which is a civilian and military positioning satellite for Russia's version of GPS. Next up, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 carrying Starlink Group 1 Mission 21 to an initial 337x252km 53.22° orbit. Launching at 1311 UTC on the same day, July 11th, from Slick 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the booster selected for this flight was B1058, which equalled the record from the most flights flown by a single booster, 13, and it marked the 100th flight of a flight-proven booster. It successfully landed on just read the instructions, 664km downrange at the launch pad, but the same can't be said for one of the fairings. When support ship Bob returned to Port Canaveral on the 10th of July, only one fairing half could be seen on the back of the boat, with no word on what happened to the other one. According to SpaceX fleet expert Gav Cornwell, this is the first time in over a year that SpaceX has been unable to recover one of the fairings from an east coast launch. The final launch to cover is the first mission of Starlink Shell 3, which was launched at 0138 UTC on July 11th. Falcon 9 B1063 was chosen for this mission, launching from Space Launch Complex 4 east at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. On board was 46 satellites, which were delivered to an initial 320x307km 97.66 degree polar orbit. B1063 landed on, of course, I still love you, stationed in the Pacific Ocean, and the fairing halves will be recovered by NRC Quest. Over the next seven days, we'll be seeing the launch of Tiang Lian 203 on a long March 3BE, the maiden flight of the brand new Vegas from Arianespace, SpaceX's CRS-25 resupply mission to the ISS, and Starlink Group 4 mission 22. Because of the people on your screen now, we can keep the lights on. Thank you to all the ground support sub-orbitals, orbital and escape velocity citizens. They get access to the pre and post live show hangouts, exclusive Discord channels, and space news scripts as they're being written. Of course, the incredibly generous NeuroStream is our tomorrow Model 33 Plan Pro Plus member, and they have access to our internal Office 365 system and a custom slate. If you want to join, head to youtube.com forward slash TMRO forward slash join, or press the join button below. That's it for this episode of the news, but that's certainly not it for this week. Fingers crossed, if everything goes to plan, Jamie should be gracing you tomorrow with the story of the SOS program. Jared should be gracing you on Wednesday or Thursday with the first proper images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and then Dr. Tamritha Scove will be filling in whatever day Jared doesn't use with an update on space weather. Hopefully we'll see you then. Thanks for watching, and goodbye.