 It's January 30th, 2019 and this is your as of yet unnamed space news update. Let's get started with one of the most exciting parts of space, launches, and as an extra bonus, our hologram is back from repair. Ah, all systems seem to be back online. Now, I actually hate to disappoint you folks, but we're currently experiencing a new year lull with no orbital rocket launches slated for next week, and we only had one rocket launch from last week coming out of India, but it was still a really cool launch. This is the PSLV rocket, or the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, and this is actually a new variant of the rocket called the PSLV-DL, but this variant only has two strap-on solid rocket boosters, whereas the PSLV normally flies with either six solid rocket boosters or no solid rocket boosters strapped onto the side. This launch occurred on Thursday, January 24th, at 1807 Coordinated Universal Time from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Shriharakota, India. The payloads for this mission were MicroSat-R and Kalamsat-V2. MicroSat-R is basically a dedicated military satellite, however the other payload, Kalamsat-V2, is actually a student payload, which isn't actually a satellite. It's just a scientific payload that's going to be running from the fourth stage, the upper stage of the rocket, after the primary payload is separated. And now for a little bit of statistics, let's look at our worldwide launch tally so far for the year. China and the United States are tied at two rocket launches apiece, and India now has its first launch of the year, and they're currently tied with Japan that also has one launch so far this year. Iran technically attempted an orbital rocket launch this year, but the third stage failed so it did not reach orbit completely, so I'm still counting it as a really awesome attempt, but Iran hasn't had any successful rocket launches yet this year. As I mentioned earlier, there are no upcoming launches next week unless we have a surprise launch spring up, and there's a chance that China might have a surprise launch next week, but unless there is any surprises, there won't be a launch minute next week because there won't be any orbital launches to talk about. Now, while we only count orbital rocket launches for the launch minute, Blue Origin did have a successful test last week. It's been a very busy week for Blue Origin. On Wednesday, January 23, 2019, Blue flew their third-built New Shepard rocket for the fourth time, if that makes any sense. Lift-off occurred at 1505 Universal Time from their West Texas site. The crew capsule reached a peak apogee of 108.4 kilometers with a peak speed of 3,582 kilometers per hour on its 10-minute 15-second flight. Previous flights for this booster happened in December of 2017, April 2018, and July of 2018. Now, there were eight experiments on this flight, many of which helped the future of rockets and spacecraft. One such test was the modal propellant gauging experiment. This payload demonstrates a way to measure fuel levels in microgravity using sound waves. It's not something we normally think of, but when you look back to the old Apollo liquid hydrogen tank cameras in microgravity or the older SpaceX footage when they showed the onboard liquid oxygen tank, you can see that microgravity fuel just sort of sloshes around. That action can make it hard to understand how much fuel is actually left. This experiment may help with that problem and be one of the main keys to simplifying on-orbit refueling and reusability. There were many other incredible experiments, and our own Lisa Stojanovsky went over these experiments in great detail on our last live show, Tomorrow Space, orbit 12.04. If you'd like additional information, just head right on over there. But flying wasn't the only news from Blue this week. They also broke ground in a new engine production facility at the Huntsville Cummings Research Park in Alabama. This new site will be where the powerful BE-4 engine will be produced. Blue's BE-4 engine is slated to be the most powerful methalox engine on the planet, capable of producing 2,446 kilonewtons of force at sea level. You may be thinking yourself, what about the SpaceX Raptor engine? Well right now, external data has that engine pegged at 1,993 kilonewtons of force at sea level a bit below the BE-4. However, Raptor's still in development and those numbers may change. BE-4 is currently undergoing full-scale testing in their Van Horn testing facility in West Texas. Once that's complete, it's expected that the final design will begin production in the new Huntsville Manufacturing Plant when it opens in 2020 with the first flight engine rolling off the line in 2021. Blue is the latest addition to the Huntsville Cummings Research Park, which is the second largest research park in the United States and fourth largest in the world. This new project should open up about 300 new jobs down there and with the recent aerospace layoffs from SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and StratoLaunch, more jobs are certainly welcome in the industry. And now a program that we've been excited about for a long time is about to become operational, the Commercial Crew Program. SpaceX, in fact, is about to perform a test flight of their Crew Dragon, although without a crew on board during its first shakedown cruise to the International Space Station. The reason we know that this uncrewed test flight designated Demo Mission 1 or DM1 is about to happen is because SpaceX has performed a static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket with the DM1 Crew Dragon integrated on top. This is standard procedure before any flight of SpaceX's liquid-fueled Falcon 9 rocket, and usually the actual flight occurs days or weeks after the static fire test. Right now, SpaceX is hoping to launch this mission sometime in February, hopefully mid-February, although the date isn't set in stone yet. And there is a chance that it could be delayed even further beyond February because, well, spaceflight is hard, and they're going to perform many more tests to ensure that everything on this mission works as planned. Part of that testing includes this beautiful new Crew Access Arm, which is how astronauts will board the vehicle in the future. The arm measures 25 meters in length and sits 80 meters above sea level, 21 meters higher than the orbiter access arm used for the space shuttle. Launch Complex 39A's first-ever Crew Access Arm was actually for the Apollo missions, and sat 100 meters above the pad surface on the mobile launch platform, or 20 meters higher than even the SpaceX Access Arm. We also got this incredible time lapse of the Crew Access Arm in operation, swinging around and coming right up to the Dragon capsule, sitting on top of its Falcon 9 rocket right now. Although nobody will use this Access Arm to board the vehicle on this flight, astronauts are going to be walking down this aisle on future flights, so SpaceX needs to make sure that it works too. And if anything, it's just cool to see this point of view. One thing is for sure, it is an exciting time for spaceflight, and it's about to get a lot more interesting. One web is getting closer to launching their satellite constellation, and founder Greg Weiler has a side project that could help him along. If you're not yet familiar with OneWeb, let me read you in. OneWeb's looking to launch a constellation of between 600 and 900 satellites to provide global internet access, and will be a competitor to the SpaceX Starlink system. They've been making great strides in their satellite production, although rumors have the cost of each satellite coming in at $1 million rather than the $500,000 they had originally targeted. Not to worry, some testing on the ground, and with their six currently flying satellites, they found they may be able to reduce their constellation from 900 to 600, making up some of that cost, but still $150 million over target. And frankly, that's not too terrible for a large aerospace project of this size. They're expected to start a rapid launch campaign at the end of 2019 with one area on space operated Soyuz every three weeks, targeting 150 satellites in orbit by the end of the year, with only 300 satellites needed to be operational, that's half of the satellites they want up before starting service in just one year. But the satellite's only part of the story, you still need user terminals on the ground. User terminals, the thing that talks to the satellite from your home or business, and would include things like the antenna, the datamodum, and the battery, sort of like a satellite-enabled version of your cable internet service you may have at home. A traditional service to your home would use a geostationary satellite or a fixed point in the sky. You'd point your dish at that spot and, blam, you'd get signal. But these next generation lower latency internet satellites, they don't work that way. They're at a much lower altitude and as such, move around the sky, which requires that your dish, or in this case antenna, moves with them. There are two ways you can do this, a mechanically moving dish that literally moves to keep lock with the satellite, these are large, expensive, and break and are terrible, or an electronically steering or scan antenna which doesn't move, but traditionally has a complex manufacturing process which in turn makes them expensive to produce. This is where a company of only 20 people called Wafer comes in. They've developed a low-cost antenna that's easy to manufacture and should just cost $15. It's an electronically steered system that can support up to 50 megabits downlink using the same frequencies as the one-web satellite. You should be able to add additional wafers to get more bandwidth out of the system. The antenna is only one part of the user terminal, but an innovation like this could bring the price from several thousands of dollars to a mere two to three hundred dollars, which is in line with what consumers pay today. Maybe a touch more, but at least within the same ballpark. At 50 megabits per second, that's twice the rate that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission considers acceptable for fixed broadband connections, and that's just early testing too with only one antenna. If all goes well, the Wafer antenna should be available around 2020 right as the one-web constellation starts to come online for commercial use. So if you're not fond of your internet service provider, or hate that they have no competition, space-based internet may soon be here to rescue us. This last week, we talked about the Mars Opportunity rover on our live show, and I did want to provide just a really quick update here. The last communication from AAPI was June 10th, 2018, after a giant dust storm essentially knocked out the solar panels on the rover. It was hoped that during a period of what NASA calls dust clearing season, or Martian season where dust gets blown off of the solar panels for most of our red planet spacecraft, the communications would be restored. JPL has been trying to communicate with AAPI since September 2018 and has only heard a deafening silence. Over the past seven months, there have actually been over 600 attempts to contact the rover, but nothing. Recently, the laboratory has tried sending new commands in what they call sweep and beep. It's the same technique they tried with AAPI's twin rover Spirit back in 2010. They'll send a command to the rover asking it to respond with the bing, just to get some sort of reply. Once they have that, engineers can work a plan to figure out what's wrong, but first, they just need that ping. Along with these uplink commands are few troubleshooting techniques. It's possible the primary X-band radio on AAPI's busted, or it could be that the clocks that drive the computers or brain of the rover are out of sync and need to be reset. So the uploaded sweeps will ask the opportunity to reset the clocks and try moving to the secondary X-band radio. Time is of the essence. We're moving into southern winter on Mars. This means that temperatures are about to dip down to really, really low levels. So low that the batteries, wiring, or computers could be irreversibly damaged, preventing the litter rover that could from ever calling home again. Even if opportunity never calls home. This was still a wildly successful mission from JPL. Designed for 90 Martian days or sols, AAPI logged its 5,000th sol back in February of 2018. It's traveled over 45 kilometers on Mars while only designed to travel about one. We'll keep watching this rover with a keen eye. If there's one thing I've learned to hear tomorrow is to never bet against any of the engineers at JPL. If there's anyone on the planet who can figure out a way to communications back from a rover 54 million kilometers away, it's the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That's our new show for this week, but the conversation continues. Vote for the story that you think should have additional commentary and conversation on our next live show. Speaking of the live show, on February 2nd, we're welcoming Lena DeWynn, the deputy head of administration for Asgardia, the first space nation. If you have questions about Asgardia, put them in our comments section or watch live this Saturday at 1800 Universal Time. The live shows are always a lot of fun and a great place for space geeks to hang out and nerd out for a bit. I also want to take a moment to thank all of the citizens of tomorrow for helping to make all of our shows happen. Each of these new shows takes well over 10 hours to produce and we couldn't do it without your help. If you enjoy shows like this or live shows or science shows, please consider contributing. Head over to patreon.com slash tmro to see our rewards and goals. We've got a lot of really great stuff coming out for patrons in 2019 too. And one more housekeeping item. We do want to give this show a name that's something more than just space news. Actually, we might be required to. In the comments it was pointing out that spacenews.com may actually have a trademark on the name space news. So we need to call this something that's not space news pretty much legally. So we would like you, the community, to vote on what you would like it to be. There are three options. There's orbital interface, there's downlink, and then there's quindar. Pick which one you like the most and we will announce the winner and next week's show. Thank you everyone so much for joining us. We'll see you tomorrow.