 Hey, what's up everybody, welcome to tomorrow. This week I wanted to wrap up the last orbital rocket launch of July and ask how a particular rocket test is manifesting the goal of rocket reusability. This is your space pod for August 3rd, 2016. So first off, United Launch Alliance has successfully launched a satellite for the United States National Reconnaissance Office, and this launch took place on Thursday July 28th at 1237 Coordinated Universal Time, from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 41. Check out the launch footage. Five, four, three, two, we have RD-180 ignition and we have liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the NRO L61 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. This launch was an Atlas V rocket in the 4-2-1 configuration, which means it has a 4-meter faring, two solid rocket boosters, and a single engine centaur upper stage. As for the payload itself, it is designated NRO L61, but that's all we know. National Reconnaissance Office satellites are all classified, but with some amateur astronomy and educated guesses, we can speculate on what the payload might be. For one thing, this satellite was encapsulated in the longest payload faring that United Launch Alliance offers in the 4-meter diameter faring size. It's called the Extra Extended Payload Faring, very original, at 14 meters or 46 feet in length. This is the longest faring that the National Reconnaissance Office has used for one of their satellites. Ground-based observations have confirmed that the spacecraft is heading for geostationary orbit, and based on the other programs that the National Reconnaissance Office has, such as the Quasar communication satellites, the intruder ocean surveillance satellites, the trumpet intelligence satellites, whatever that means, the Topaz radar imaging satellites, and probably a whole bunch of other programs that are still secret. It's likely that this might be the first satellite in the fourth generation of Quasar satellites for data relay and such. The reason for this is that the Quasar satellites that the NRO has in orbit right now are pretty old, and their most recent ones are getting close to the 15-year lifespan that most modern satellites have. So if the National Reconnaissance Office still needs their own independent communications network, then this is one theory as to what this particular payload might be. And if you want to look a little bit deeper into mission patch symbology, which the National Reconnaissance Office loves to hide clues in, then we can take a look at this mission patch and the promotional poster for this particular mission. On both pictures, they're using a lizard called Spike, and Spike is their mascot that they're using to try to inspire children through outreach. At least that's their stated goal with this anyway, and there's a whole bunch of other images of Spike that you can find on the National Reconnaissance Office Twitter feed. Very crazy. But in a sense, I think of Spike as a way of saying information or data, and then there are the four stars, or quasars, if you will. But the largest star is Hollow, and in the mission patch, the Hollow star is closest to the payload. Maybe these four stars represent the four generations of quasar spacecraft, with the Hollow one representing the new generation that hasn't been filled yet. And this mission is just the first piece. Hmm, interesting to think about, but just speculation. It is fun to try to decode their mission patches, though. But moving right along, we got some SpaceX news to talk about. So first off, their Falcon 9 first stage that launched the JC-SAT-14 satellite back in May of this year, and that they landed successfully on their autonomous spaceport drone ship, has been shipped to McGregor, Texas, at their test facilities, and on the same day as the NRL-61 launch, they did a full-duration static test fire of that first stage. And apparently it was successful. Check it out. This test is kind of long, so I'm just going to talk over it a bit. Since this particular test, two more static fire tests have occurred. But footage of only this first test has been published by SpaceX. Although if you look online, you can find footage taken by McGregor, Texas locals that seem to show those additional tests. Elon Musk has stated that this booster will be test-fired more than ten times to get as much data out of it as they can. Previously, when this booster had landed on the autonomous spaceport drone ship, it came in hot and landed kind of hard. And Elon Musk has said that this booster would not be able to fly again. But considering it's relatively good condition, they're going to do as many tests with it and push it as hard as they can to better understand the limits of what might qualify a used booster for another launch. This is very exciting news, and I'm very hopeful that the data will be good. And aside from this booster and the booster that was used on the CRS-8 mission, the first one that they were able to land successfully and that will be going on display at their headquarters in Halthorne, California, I'm hoping that they'll be able to relaunch all of their growing inventory of Falcon 9 first stages. This is awesome, but time will tell if the data is good and if they are even able to relaunch any of them. That's still a possibility. I mean, this isn't set in stone, but I'm very hopeful and very enthusiastic towards this program. But moving right along, also in SpaceX related news, NASA has officially ordered another crew flight on their Crew Dragon capsule to send up astronauts to the International Space Station. They already had one order for that and their competitor Boeing has two orders already to send up astronauts on their CST-100 Starliner capsule. So now both companies are equal and that they have two orders to send up astronauts after all of their demo flights of both vehicles are complete. So that's good news. The commercial crew and cargo programs are proceeding very well and mostly on schedule. But I think I'll give a detailed analysis of what those updates are in a future video, especially since there's some crucial milestones that are about to take place. So stay tuned for that and I think I'm going to end things here. So thank you very much for watching this video and let me know what you think about these topics. Do you agree with my theory or have an alternate theory as to what the NRL-61 spacecraft might be? Let me know in the comment section below and also connect with us on all of our social medias. Our Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, our website. We're all of them so that you can join in the conversation with us. This is of course a crowd funded show through Patreon. And I want to give a huge thank you to all of our patrons whose continued contributions allow us to keep making these videos. Without you guys, we wouldn't be able to do this and I'm just eternally grateful for your guys' generosity. If you would like to support the show, please visit patreon.com slash Spacepod for more information and to sign up at whatever level you feel is appropriate. Also a quick update about the tomorrow live show. We're hoping to return on August 13th. That's all depending on if we can get all the studio stuff moved and time and everything like that. Unfortunately, I'm here in Arizona and the rest of the crew is in California. So I wish I could be helping them more, but I can't right now. But in any case, we're really hoping to get back on August 13th. And if not, then hopefully the week after that. But in any case, tomorrow live shows will be returning. Very soon. So thanks again for watching this video. My name is Michael Clark. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.