 The chopsticks have done more testing, the world's largest plane has flown yet again, and NASA might be running out of astronauts. Welcome, citizens of Earth, to another action-packed episode of Tomorrow News. We've got all of that and more coming up on this episode, so stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News, which is for the week of January 18th, 2022. We're heading straight down to Starbase to kick off this week's episode with the coverage of some load tests on Mechazilla. As we very maturely talked about on last week's live show available at the card in the corner, some interestingly shaped water-bangest bags were attached to the bar hooked between the two catch arms on the orbital launch tower to simulate different masses of different starship and super-heavy configurations landing on the arms. The wide bay has continued construction, and the third level is now well underway as it grows upward, something which is very exciting to see. If you don't know, this new building will be able to hold multiple different super-heavy boosters and starships as they are being constructed, or as they await the rollout to the pad. This unused nose cone has sadly reached the end of its life with it being picked up for scrapping. Even though the site down at Starbase has been growing and is continuing to grow quickly, you can't keep everything, and it was kind of pointless just having it sit there, so it had to go. The final part of Booster 3 has also been taken down to the scrapyard, with it being lifted off of Suborbital Pad A last Thursday, and following this, the water-bangest bags were removed from the chopsticks. Some new panels have been added to the Raptor engine shielding around the underside of Booster 4, and the aero covers around the helium tanks have been reattached. The ship's quick disconnect arm has had a crew sent up to it, presumably just to make sure that it was all right after the movement tests over the prior week. If anything did come loose, then I'm sure they could have sorted that out as well. Parts of Booster 7 have been popping up in the high bay with the methane tank starting to be stacked up. Booster 7 is believed to be one of the first, if not the first, new Booster to be built for Raptor 2, so hopefully the construction goes quite quickly because we are still yet to see a next-generation version of Raptor in the wild. One of the manufacturing tents at the production site has been lifted up and swung over into a new location, and I'm not too sure on the purpose of this, but I'm assuming it is to make more room for something else. Lastly from Texas this week, SpaceX's Libre LR-11000 crane has rolled over to ship number 20, and the load spreader attachment has been connected up as the Starship vehicle poised to be the first to reach orbital velocities awaits being lifted up. Jonathan McDowell tweeted some concerning data about a batch of Starlink satellites the other day, but looking like 12 of the satellites aboard version 1 launch 22 had not been raised to their 550km orbit, instead being held at 350km before being de-orbited entirely. That is 20% of the total payload not being operational, which is quite concerning, but it does seem to be a problem just related to this specific batch of satellites. The new versions of the Starlink satellites have been rolling out with lasers being used to increase the bandwidth available, so hopefully this won't happen again. We also have Starlink V2 coming soon, but as that is currently designed to launch exclusively on Starship, we'll just have to wait and see how that pans out. The plane with the largest wingspan ever built, officially known as the Scaled 351 Stratolauncher, registered under November 351 Sierra Lima, but affectionately known by everybody as Rock, made its third test flight last weekend, with one of the most notable parts of this test being the retraction and extending tests of the left main mid-gear, to get ready for their next test flight when Stratolauncher will be testing all of the landing gear. Taking off from runway 30 at the Mojave Air and Spaceport at 1648 Coordinated Universal Time, the NASA spaceflight livestream provided us with some fantastic shots of the aircraft taking flight, and as it disappeared into the Californian skies, we could still see where it was as, at its peak, it was being tracked by over 57,000 people on flight radar 24 alone. It's very interesting to see the crossover of the aircraft enthusiast and aerospace enthusiast communities as this is one of the largest aircraft in the world and is designed to carry rockets. A report released on January 11th by NASA's Office of Inspector General found that the agency's current 44 active astronauts in its corpse could soon fall below the minimum manifest requirement with the Artemis program coming online and the need to support the International Space Station and anything else that NASA wants to do. The astronaut corpse is currently at its smallest size since the 1970s and it is way off the nearly 150 astronaut peak in 2000. There is a 15% safety margin on the sides of the corpse as in the event that an astronaut is not available then they will need to be replaced and that number is actually down from 2014 when it was 25%. Continued attrition of the current corpse and demand for additional astronauts for the Artemis missions will have to be dealt with by the agency with their new class of astronauts having started training this life but they won't be ready to fly for two years. Because of this there is a chance that there won't be enough backup astronauts if something happens to a main astronaut or astronauts during the preparation for a mission. NASA could also be overestimating the time left available to train up the astronauts for Artemis II and Artemis III as there is only about two years until the former is intended to fly and there is a big difference between an Artemis mission and an ISS mission. For now we'll just have to wait and see how NASA responds to the report. It didn't explicitly say that NASA is running out of astronauts or that they will not have enough to support their future plans however it did recommend that NASA should reevaluate the 15% safety margin used for determining the size of the corpse, their lack of good astronaut demographic data and new guidance for evaluating training. I've left the 41-page PDF document in the description below if you want to give it a read. NASA is really doing well to make the headlines this week as they have announced that they are going to go ahead with a line of probe-class missions to fill the gap between the big flagship missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the smaller Explorer-class spacecraft with a cost cap of one billion US dollars excluding the launch international contributions and observer programs these missions would be similar to the new frontiers line of NASA planetary science missions. The latest Astrophysics Decadal Survey Astro 2020 did endorse the work on these probe-class missions but it did recommend that the cost cap should be increased by 1.5 times up to 1.5 billion dollars. The formal community announcement which was released on January the 11th included a schedule for the first probe competition with a draft announcement of opportunity or AO set to be released in June followed by the final AO in a year's time with the 90-day period following that being the last period of time where proposals can be submitted. Two or three proposals would then be selected in early 2024 with them being valued at about 5 million USD each before the final winner will be selected in 2025. The proposals are being limited however to just two concepts a far infrared imaging and spectroscopy space telescope or an X-ray mission that would complement ESA's yet to be launched X-ray telescope Athena. Sadly because of the current budget NASA is anticipating only being able to fly one of these types of missions per decade but Paul Hertz Astrophysics Division Director at NASA has said if the astrophysics budget grows fast enough to accommodate the recommendations of the Decadal Survey plus an increased probe cadence NASA would certainly be open to that. As you can probably tell there have been a few reports coming out about US government agencies and the Department of Defense is no different. The Office of Inspector Forced Department released a report on January 7th that found out that the Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the Western Range at Vandenberg Space Force Base are continuing to rely on outdated equipment to support launches. Sometimes it gets so bad that the service needs to go to online marketplaces such as eBay to find spare parts. 28% of systems such as radars, antennas and commands destruct systems lacked spare parts because they are obsolete either because they are no longer manufactured or because the companies that did make the components have actually gone out of business. According to the Space Force the average age of range items with a potential mission impact with no available spares is more than 30 years old. Luckily these issues have not been a major impact for launches out of either range in recent years. The report found that there were no problems between January 2016 and March 2021 excluding a wildfire at Vandenberg which damaged communications lines. The launch cadence out of both coasts is expected to rise rapidly over the next few years reaching a predicted 119 that's a lot in 2027 at the Cape so it is important that potential issues like this are ironed out. One approach to mitigate the risk is to install an autonomous flight safety system onto the launch vehicles themselves as Space Launch Delta 45 recently noted that a recent launch of a vehicle without an AFSS required 29 range items to support it however a vehicle with an AFSS required just six. The Space Force is working on range modernization to address the concerns in the report which is under a project called Range of the Future but Colonel James Horne the deputy director of launch and range operations for space systems at Patrick Space Force Base believes that the name is inadequate and it should be the range of the now as there is already so many things that they have done to enable the current surge in launches. Talking of launches it's time for space traffic. Starting off the space traffic this week we had another launch from SpaceX Transporter 3 on board was over 100 different small sites which lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and are currently heading to their Sun Synchronous Orbits. For the 10th time in its life Booster B1058 successfully touched down at LZ1 which marks the 28th consecutive landing of a Falcon 9 booster. This is also the first time that SpaceX launched both the first and second launch of the year which really goes to show that they have a launch cadence and a half for 2022. To put the icing on the cake Planet who had 44 Superdust satellites inside the ferry used one of their pre-existing satellites on orbit to get this awesome footage of the first return to launch site recovery of the year. If you look very closely you can see the Falcon Booster sitting on landing zone one. The second launch cover is above the clouds which was Virgin Orbit's first flight of the year and it went as planned following a one-day push from January 12th to January 13th. Cosmic Girl, the Boeing 747-400 carrier aircraft took off from runway 30 at the Mojave Air and Spaceport at 2139 Coordinated Universal Time with Launcher 1 being dropped just over an hour later at 2252 above the Pacific Ocean. The satellites on board from the United States Department of Defense, SAP Revolution and Spire Global are heading for a 500km 45 degree low-earth orbit. China's first launch of the year came in the form of Cheyenne 13 which was placed atop a Long March 2D. Gifting off from launch complex 9 at the Cheyenne satellite launch centre, as it is China, we know very little about what was actually inside of the payload ferry but it was declared for technological demonstration purposes. Coming up over the next seven days, we have Star and Group 4 Mission 6 on the Falcon Knight and USSF-8 on the Atlas V 511. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tamata Scove. Space weather this week is definitely getting a bit on the lively side. As we take a look at our Earth-facing disc, you can see all of the active regions and in fact one of them lights off WHAM right there back on the 14th. That was reaching 2925 and it fires off what looks like a partially Earth-directed solar storm but because it's actually on the west side of this big coronal hole the fast solar wind from that coronal hole kind of pushes this storm off to the west yet wait for it because right here WHAM on the 16th we had region 2929 fire off yet another partially Earth-directed solar storm and this time it's on the other side of that coronal hole so this particular solar storm might actually come to hit Earth. We're going to get maybe a glancing blow in and around the 20th. It's kind of hard to tell. We're waiting for more coronagraph imagery and our prediction models to tell us for sure but you can see it's beginning to be a pretty active sun. In fact as we take a look at our far side this is stereo A and it's looking at the sun just a little bit from the side. You can see all of this activity still on the sun's far side including everything on the east limb. There's at least three more active regions on the east limb of stereo's view that have not rotated into earth view yet and some of these might be big flare players so it looks like we are going to continue to have an elevated m flare risk over the next couple days and that could cause radio blackouts which could affect radio propagation and radio comms for space traffic. For more details on this week's space weather including when and where you can see aurora how those solar storms might affect you and what does it mean to have big m flare players check out my channel we're seeing me at space weatherwoman.com. 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If you want to have a discussion about the world of spaceflight past present or future a discord server can be found at the link in the description down below as well as all the sources of the power of the stories in this episode so if you want to do some further reading like that massive pdf document i mentioned earlier or you just want to see where we get our data everything is down there. Thank you so much for watching we'll see you in the news next week goodbye.