 In this week's news, Starship has another hold from the FAA, SpaceX are holding Dragon production, S.A.S. has delayed the first fully private mission to the ISS and Vulcan, it's still on schedule. This is Tomorrow Space News. Crew Dragon is currently the only way to fly to space from the United States, and it is only one of three currently operational crewed vehicles, alongside China's Shenzhou and Russia's Soyuz. However, unlike the other two, Dragon is reusable, which is why SpaceX are holding production of the spacecraft in favour of Starship development. According to the president of SpaceX, Gwen Shotwell, the company is now finishing up their final capsule, however they will still be manufacturing components for refurbishment and the parts which are not reused, such as the trunk. SpaceX will still be able to make more dragons if need be, but the plan is to manage the current four dragon fleet at the most efficient pace possible. SpaceX are aiming to fly each Dragon spacecraft at least five times, which would give them a total of twenty flights with their current fleet of Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance and Freedom. That total number of flights will approach rather quickly however as Endeavour and Resilience have already completed two flights and Endurance is currently flying its first, but that twenty flight cap is only a minimum. As long as SpaceX checks out each Dragon properly then there shouldn't be any problems with making the maximum number of flights a larger number. All it will take is a bit more paperwork. Freedom is scheduled for use on the Crew 4 mission which is coming up next month and once that launches all of the Crew Dragons will be in operation. There are a lot of Crew Dragon flights scheduled for SpaceX including the rest of the commercial Crew contract with NASA which is a minimum of five more flights after Crew 4, there's the Axiom contract which is a minimum of three more flights after AX1 and there are the Polaris flights with two flights scheduled on Dragon. Do note however that this four vehicle fleet is purely just the Crew Variation of Dragon. The two existing cargo dragons are soon going to be joined by a third and they operate SpaceX's commercial resupply contract with NASA to carry cargo up to the International Space Station. There has been no official words that I have seen at least on the status on the fleet size of those capsules but I'll make sure to bring you that data on the show as soon as we get it. SpaceX did this to move attention over to Starship which has suffered another delay in Boca Chica's environmental review. Originally scheduled for completion in December it was then pushed to February 28th then to March 28th and now April 29th. It's not that delays are unheard of, it's just annoying that every month we get closer to the release of the assessment and then it's delayed by another month. Realistically this won't impact Booster 7 and Ship 24's timeline, the next combo expected to perform the orbital flight test but it could start to make a difference if it goes on for much longer. Booster 4 was on the orbital launch mount last Monday performing a test with methane for the first time into the night. We know it was methane because the methane recondenser was turned on. This was followed three days later with Booster 4 being removed from the orbital launch mount following Elon Musk's announcement that the orbital flight test will not be carried out by a Raptor 1 compatible vehicle, which Booster 4 is. The super heavy booster was then placed onto one of the custom transport stands which SpaceX have created and at the time of writing Booster 4 is yet to roll back to the production site but we are expecting it very soon. The reason Booster 4 hasn't rolled back yet is probably because Booster 7 can't decide where it's meant to be. It rolled out of the high bay, then it rolled back into the high bay, then it rolled back out of the high bay and then part of Booster 8 was rolled into the high bay and then Booster 7 was rolled back into the high bay for the final time. Yet another booster forward dome has been sleeved and at the top of the rings section you can see two of the ports which grid fins attached to which is how we know this is a forward dome section. A new thrust pack for a super heavy booster has also been spotted and it has the connections for 13 Gimbaling Raptor 2 engines. In this shot from Mick Anciwini the height differences between the high bay and the wide bay are very apparent. The width of the two structures also differ quite a bit which is easy to see here. Ship 24's nose cone and the ring section which goes underneath that nose cone has had some starbrick thermal protection tile supplied onto the side. The actual nose cone is significantly more covered but there are still a few more spots to go. This strange cutout in the side of the cargo door pathfinder ring section has led many people in the community to speculate a new design for the way that SpaceX will deploy its Starlink satellites. Instead of opening a large payload bay door the satellites could be deployed like a giant PEZ dispenser, spitting out satellites one at a time in quick succession. Starship may be SpaceX's next generation of rocket but Vulcan is ULA's next generation of rocket and according to their CEO Tori Bruno Vulcan Centaur is on track for a debut launch this year. Blue Origin's BE4 engines are powering the first stage of the heavy lift vehicle and Bruno says that they're performing better than he had anticipated which is a brilliant sign. Testing of the first two flight ready engines is going well with them being tested three times a week on a sustained basis. Derek Jones, Blue Origin's senior vice president of Nuglian has said that BE4 has a cumulative firing time of five hours over all of the engine tests which leaves the development right where it needs to be. The engines are expected to arrive at ULA's doorstep in the middle of the year which means that the first launch could commence before the end of the year. I'm very excited to hear this news because Vulcan has been delayed from an initial scheduled debut in 2019. It's not as bad as some scheduling delays have seen the result of recently but delays still suck whether that's four years or 14. It's also going to be in the club of the three vehicles from the US which have at least considered reusability but data on that is still not fantastic. The other two of course are the Falcon 9 and Neutron. In 2019, ULA did say they were still planning to eventually reuse the two first stage BE4 engines as well as the avionics and thrust structure through the detachable smart reuse system but one, it's the last time we heard of it and two, they're still throwing the rest of the rocket away. Northbrook Grumman's satellite servicing company Space Logistics has just successfully performed the first firing of their electric propulsion system which they plan to use on their mission extension pods or MEPs which are planned to first launch in 2024. They're designed to add up to six years onto a satellite's life in geostationary orbit and Optus, a satellite operator based in Australia, is already in line to be the first customer of the technology. According to Space Logistics however, Optus aren't the only people who are eager to use the MEPs to make their satellites last longer as there are a lot of different companies who want to use the system. The plan is to launch a mission robotic vehicle or MRV on a Falcon rocket in two years time which will have three MEPs attached. Once placed into a lower orbit, the MRV will raise itself to the altitude of a geostationary orbit before installing the MEPs on the customer satellites. The Indian Space Research Organisation or the ISRO have carried out a successful test of their new solid rocket booster at the Satish Devan Space Centre which will power their new small satellite launch vehicle of the SSLV. Called SS-1, the stage is in three different segments and it uses bond free joints between each of those segments and it has four fins to stay in control during flight as solid rocket motors are rarely gimbalable. When all four stages are stacked, the rocket will stand at about 34 meters tall, approximately half the height of a Falcon 9 and it will be capable of carrying 800 kilograms of payload to a 300 kilometer low Earth orbit. The first launch of this new rocket is scheduled for May of this year and on board will be a test satellite called EOS 2. If that launch goes well, then ISRO's first commercial launch of the vehicle will be to carry four BlackSky Earth observation satellites to orbit on behalf of Spaceflight Inc. Axion 1, the first ever fully-private commercial flight to the International Space Station with Michael Lopez-Allegria, Ayrton Stibb, Larry Connor and Mark Pathy for a 10-day trip to the orbiting lab, is currently scheduled to commence on April 6th following a three-day delay because of the big orange rocket. SLS is scheduled to perform its wet dress rehearsal on April 3rd, the same original date as AX1, but because it has priority, the launch was pushed, which was a big scheduling conflict for NASA. SLS is NASA's priority and according to Kathy Ruders, the associate administrator for space operations at NASA, the wet dress for Artemis 1 has the range, which means nothing else rocket-related can happen. Obviously, there could be delays to SLS for a variety of different reasons, but fingers crossed it will only be by a day if it does get delayed as the range will need at least a day or two to sort out the fueling for the Falcon 9 following the wet dress rehearsal of SLS. The wet dress didn't just impact the Axion mission, however, as NASA's next crewed flight to the ISS could also be impacted if AX1 is delayed too much. If Axion 1 launches on all before the 7th of April, crew 4 will not be impacted as NASA wants at least two days between the return of AX1 and the launch of crew 4. However, if AX1's return is past April 17th, then crew 4 will be pushed on a day-by-day basis depending on the current status of the Axion mission. There isn't really much more to talk about, but NASA provided us with so much awesome public domain footage of SLS over the last few days that I just want an excuse to use it. If you want to watch all 10 minutes of this 4K 60fps helicopter camp eye candy, it's linked in the description, but now we need to address the fact that China broke the schedule last week and they launched a payload into orbit. There were no scheduled orbital launches, but that turned out not to be the truth. China hit us with a sneaky launch which they hadn't scheduled publicly that far in advance, which was the maiden Long March 6A carrying Pujung-2 and Tiankun-2 for the rocket's demonstration mission. Launching from the Taiwan satellite launch centre, the payload went to an unknown place and the launch has been reported to be a success. The new and improved version of the Long March 6 has doubled the amount of engines on the first stage over its predecessor, as well as four solid rocket boosters. Coming up this week, we have a Long March 11 launch, the maiden flight of the Zoop 2, without mission to beat on the Electron and Transporter 4. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tamika Scope. Space weather this week gets incredibly explosive. As we take a look at our Earth-facing disc, you can see regions 2974, 75, 76, and believe it or not, this region 2975 that was sleeping a little while ago, it got some new growth that is exploded. And on the 28th, you can see it right there. Wham! It launches an M-class flare. This is an M4 flare. It also launches an Earth-directed solar storm. And we also have a radiation storm that we're dealing with right now. So it's kind of like a triple whammy and it looks like this region is continuing to grow and it's actually become an X-flare player. So we may not have seen the end of this thing yet. This is definitely affecting radio communications. And as that radiation storm hits, it's actually causing problems for the polar regions as well for navigation and communications. And then of course, when that solar storm hits, that's also going to be an issue. That's going to cause problems for the night side of Earth. Now, as we switch to our far-sided sun, this is Stereo A. And it's looking at the sun just a little bit from the side. You can see region 2975 as it fires off that big M-class flare. Yes, we are still getting radio blackouts from this region. So radio communications is continuing to be disrupted. And that means space traffic. We have to watch out for radio communications with space traffic as well. But you can also see that there are even more regions on the sun's far side, especially in the south. There's some bright regions that are rotating into view and we might even have some regions in the north. And it does look like they're a little bit flare active as well. So radio communications is definitely going to be impacted this week. And we're going to have to deal with how that impacts space traffic and also for space launch. For more details on this week's Space Weather, including how that new X-Flair player and the radiation storm that's occurring could affect space traffic and also affect you. Come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Station 204 is not a cheap space station to keep operational and on orbit, which is why the very generous citizens of tomorrow support us once a month. For their varying contributions, they receive varying perks such as seeing scripts as they're being written, exclusive disc or channels and access to the pre and post show tomorrow live broadcasts. 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