 Welcome everyone to an episode of Tomorrow News, where we talk about SN10 all the time because SN10 launched a flipped and landed and bouncing explosion and I really want to talk about it, so this is your Tomorrow News for the week of March 8th, 2021 and let's get into it already! Both the Chica played host to the 8th Starship Test flight, this time being SN10. Previously only Starhopper SN5 and SN6 have landed, the only flown full stacks of SN8 and SN9 have not. The flight had an apogee of around 10km, which is the same height as SN9, but 2.5km shorter than SN8's apogee of 12,500m. Slowly gifting off, the main goal of these test missions is to test the descent and not the ascent, so the slower the SpaceX can get to the vehicle's intended apogee, the better, as it provides more time for more data. The first big noticeable change for this flight was the different strategy for performing the flip and landing manoeuvre. All three Raptors were relighted with the weakest two shutting down sequentially one after another. The power of all three engines also managed to knock the vehicle off of its trajectory down to the pad, so when it flipped vertical it had to perform a slight correction. The shutdown of the two Raptors is also where the fire seemed to start, with it looking most likely that some methane was leaking out the second Raptor to shut down, as some trailing artifacts could be seen around the engine bell. It was then time for the moment we had all been waiting for, however it already wasn't going to go very smoothly, instead it was going to go very hardly if you can even count that as a word. SN10 was fitted with six landing legs, which are designed to absorb the shock of landing and nothing else, however as you can see here, three decided not to look into place and swing around having some fun in the air whilst they lasted, so when the vehicle came to touchdown it landed, bounced a little bit and then settled again, with the landing legs failing and the vehicle pretty much leaning on its aft fins. These landing legs have been confirmed before to be a temporary measure, so in my opinion give them a bit more research and development and Starship could be landing very very frequently. So SpaceX did it, they finally landed a full Starship vehicle even though there was a bit of a fire with a sprinkle of water, well that could be dealt with. Well at least that was the case until this little puff of black smoke appeared. So sadly at the end of the day we did lose SN10, but on the bright side SpaceX can learn from the events that followed the landing to try and prevent it from happening in the future. This is only the third flight of a full prototype vehicle and at least SpaceX showing it to us all out in rural Texas. We've only really started to see SLS components crop up over the last few years and with Blue Origin's new Gren vehicle, well we'll probably only see that when they open up their factory doors and show us the full vehicle without showing us anything else first. Gren shot, while the COO of SpaceX has said that we could be seeing Starship going orbital by the end of the year. That is quite substantial considering that we are only at suborbital flight two and in month three of the year, but if I know SpaceX yeah they could probably pull it off. The dear moon mission which will take private citizens around the moon for the first time in human history is currently slated for 2023. The SpaceX team also seem optimistic at this date although many in the community see this timeframe as unlikely. Although going to the moon with a bunch of your friends does sound really really fun we've learned very recently that Mars is currently where it's at especially if you're an audiophile who likes to drive which that's me that's that's that's very much me. After nearly three weeks of system and instrument checkouts Perseverance took its first drive on March 4th rolling forward four meters turning 150 degrees anti-clockwise and then reversing two and a half meters with wheels now finally dirtied from the surface of Mars proper all systems checked out in excellent condition and plans are underway for the deployment of Mars helicopter ingenuity sometime in the next month. Several paths from where Perseverance touched down on February 18th now named the Octavia E Butler landing to the targeted ancient inflow have been drawn up and Perseverance will be on the move soon. In the meantime it's been taking incredible images with its Mascam Z instrument and it's absolutely stunning to see Mars truly as your own eyes would if you could be there right now. Now as has been mentioned before Perseverance has two microphones on board that are capable of recording audio and it has done so and what you're going to want to do go ahead go get your very nice headphones make sure that you've got them on plug them in clear everything out make sure that you're in the zone and crank it up to 11 because here comes what Mars sounds like astonishing huh now that shrill wine that you're hearing is the sound of Perseverance itself operating on the surface of another planet how neat is that that's pretty neat and those sounds of Mars you know what if we could like you know pull out the audio of Perseverance like cancel out the whining noise that's there and me sweeten a little bit and kind of bring out what Mars would actually sound like well yeah JPL did that too that is the actual sound of wind on Mars yes Martian wind holy moly let's take a listen to that again the first sounds of Mars are breathtaking and I love that they complement the stark landscape of Mars as well very much reminds me on a lot of my camping and off-roading trips that I do out in the Mojave Desert here in California that these are the first proper audio recordings on the surface of Mars yes you've probably heard the wind noise from insight but that was taken from its seismometer so that was seismograph data that was then converted into audio that you could hear that was an actual audio itself so it's very nice to hear the actual thing for once and then a spot of news affecting something that really is involved in just about every single aspect of our modern lifestyles Lockheed Martin the prime contractor for the GPS three series of navigation satellites which are currently beginning to be sent into orbit has made a big big upgrade to them no these upgrades are not going to help Apple Maps work nor are they going to get you much more precise information that's uh for the military and we're sort of discouraged from being allowed to have that no it's actually going to be allowing these satellites to be serviced while on orbit on orbit servicing may be an emerging technology but the United States Department of Defense is going all in on it and it's not just talking about adding fuel to these GPS three satellites in the future either I mean we're talking about the ability to upgrade internal parts such as avionics navigation systems radio repeaters even attaching sensors that were not a part of the original design interesting to note that Lockheed Martin is collaborating with Aerojet Rocketdyne on developing that on orbit servicing capability which if you jog your memory bag just a few months ago you might remember that Lockheed Martin is moving to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne and Bingo was his name oh I see why you're doing that and also let's go ahead and jog our memories back a little bit further to 2019 when NASA started to actually publish prices for the international space station and commercial use of it totals that cover things such as transporting cargo to station called up mass bringing materials back to earth called down mass a dedicated amount of time for a crew member to handle whatever you're sending up and a multitude of other things and those costs were increased and I'm not talking like they went up two or three percent per year or NASA came in and said hey guys in five years we're expecting our prices to be here no they went up in like a vertical cliff and those prices were effective immediately with no warning getting the kilogram of cargo to the ISS originally cost you a cool three grand but now it's twenty thousand dollars that's nearly a seven hundred percent price increase and you want to bring that kilogram back well that used to be six thousand dollars but now it's forty thousand dollars that's also nearly a seven hundred percent price increase and if you'd like a one hour of crew time well that was originally about seventeen thousand five hundred dollars but now you're going to be dropping a whopping 130 grand per hour roughly 750 percent of an increase in price holy moly that is one heck of a price increase if I were a commercial company trying to use the international space station I would be pretty peeved right now and those companies yeah they're not exactly happy with you know these price increases in fact most of those companies ended up finding out about the price increases when journalists called them to comment on the price increases not a really great way to communicate with your customers and in addition to that a lot of these companies are saying that they've already lost customers because of these price increases as well so that's like not great for the commercial utilization of low earth orbit and this may be in response to the recent appropriations bill for fiscal year 2021 you see NASA requested 150 million dollars for this program but congress only funded it to the tune of 17 million dollars yes that is a measly 11 percent of the overall budget request for that commercial utilization program that is shades of commercial crew in the early days when congress was underfunding it like nobody's business so NASA may be trying to recoup those costs simply because it just didn't get the actual funding that this program needed and that's like not great for commercial utilization of low earth orbit so hopefully this can be resolved sooner rather than later and these companies can get their customers back and start flying them into space so Ryan let's send it right back to you the chief designer of the long march 3a series of rockets jiang ji has been in Beijing telling the chinese press about the development of two new rockets the china academy of launch vehicle technology is working on creating a new heavy lift vehicle which will most likely be called long march 9 this vehicle is speculated to be around 93 meters long have a 10 meter diameter core and have four five meter diameter side boosters similar to what is found on the long march 5 first stage which is china's current largest rocket it should also be capable of lifting 140 tons of low earth orbit or 50 to translude a rejection the second launch and development is going to be based on the long march 5 with some upgraded yf 100 caradox engines and it will also be human rated that's it for the main news then we have only a single launch since the last episode so let's have a look at it after being scrubbed in delayed a casual too many times to count starlink 17 finally lift and out of historical launch complex 39a making it the eighth flight of the b1049 booster 99 days after the previous flight of this booster it safely touched down for the eighth time and of course i still love you which was stationed down in the atlantic ocean all 60 starlink satellites aboard made it safely to their intended orbit of leo let's have a look at what's launching in the next seven days then look into a face determination and here's your space weather with dr tunifer scones space weather this week may be a bit on the quiet side but our sun is definitely brightening things up as we take a look at our earth view look at all the bright regions on the earth facing sun there's so many of them now and they are continuing to grow we have region 2806 2807 we have another region down here in the south that may be labeled 2808 because it is a teeny tiny sun spot right now i don't know if it's going to stay like that but if that doesn't get the designation then definitely the one in the north that you can see beginning to come into earth view right now that's doing a lot of whistling and farting like that that but could easily be region 270 or 2808 and 2809 perhaps we will see but we haven't had that many numbered regions on the earth facing disk in quite some time so this is really good news that it shows that our sun is trying to pull out of solar minimum on top of that we also have back on the 7th a small solar storm that was launched looks like it's going to go south of earth though so we don't have anything to worry about but we do have a few more chances of some pockets of fast solar wind from these finger light coronal holes now as we switch to our far-sided sun this is stereo a and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side look at all those bright regions isn't it wonderful both in the south and in the north it definitely shows that our sun is beginning to come out of solar minimum and you can see with those finger light coronal holes they are beginning to close up a bit which once again is more good news that we are beginning to get a little bit more active and on top of that the solar flux has now been boosted up into the low 80s which means good radio propagation on earth's day side and it's great for radio comms for more details on this week's space weather including how those bright regions and that solar storm might affect you come check out my channel or see me at space weather woman dot com we're nearly done for today but before i wrap things up let's all give a thank you to the citizens of tomorrow the immense support they give the show is truly incredible and without them we wouldn't be able to be speaking to you today so thank you to all the escape velocity orbital sub orbital and ground support citizens for making the show possible if you'd like to contribute to us as well you can do so over at youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join thank you for watching hope for yes and 11 we'll have a slightly better fate than its older sibling but until the next episode stay safe and goodbye