 31 Raptors have roared, Russia's got another leak, Blue Origin are making solar panels out of watts and a lot more news is coming your way. This is tomorrow's Space News. Let's start off with the big one, the 33 engine Static 5 that became the 31 engine Static 5 following one manual and one automatic shutdown underneath Super Heavy Booster 7. According to Elon Musk, 31 engines would have still provided enough thrust to reach orbit as redundancy is a big factor being built into Starship's design. A safe and reliable mode of transport needs high levels of redundancy as Starship is meant to start the space parallel to the modern day aviation industry. If you thought that this was a lot of cloud being produced by 31 Raptors then get ready as for the orbital flight attempt, we're expecting 33 engines firing at 90% thrust. This static fire was just 50%. Apart from the two engines that were shut down, it appears as if this static fire attempt went off without a hitch or at least that's what we're being told by SpaceX. It's a big achievement and an important achievement as the next time this many Raptors ignite it will be the start of humanity's journey to Mars. Alongside the static fire, the rest of the Starbase team has been busy with those white tanks we saw arriving on the barge last week making their way to the launch site. They've been installed on this concrete platform where they'll serve as the water day luge tanks, hopefully to try and reduce the strength of the sound waves produced by the business end of the super heavy boosters. The flapless and heat shieldless Ship 26 has been rolled out to the launch site and placed onto suborbital pad A. It is quite strange seeing a barebones vehicle which looks to follow the basic design shared by the HLS lunar variant and the on orbit tanker variant. It's probably still a good idea to have some very tough concrete under the launch mount just in case which is why SpaceX has been testing out concrete at their McGregor testing facility which is just a few hours up the road from Starbase. You can see that a metal frame holding up concrete is laying on the ground right next to this pedestal which is conveniently placed directly in front of one of the horizontal Raptor test stands. And we can see here a couple of short firings of a Raptor at a piece of concrete. Remember when I said that Iceland was one of the European regions yet to have connectivity to the Starlink network? Well earlier this week SpaceX announced that Iceland now does have access to Starlink and that the previously unserved area of northern Brazil does now have service as well. Look out everyone there's another leak on the International Space Station. It is a cool leak but it isn't on a Soyuz, instead it's on the Soyuz's cargo carrying cousin. Progress MS-21 docked to the Zenith port on the Poisk module last October bringing up supplies for the crew on board. About five months later on Saturday the 11th of February a leak started in the coolant system. In September of 2022 Soyuz MS-22 was launched carrying two Cosmonauts and one American astronaut to the ISS. Three months later it sprung a leak in the coolant system resulting in Roscosmos fast tracking the launch of Soyuz MS-23 to bring the crew home. Starting to notice a pattern here. Editing Ryan here as we have a new photo. With the first leak, the one on Soyuz MS-22, it was blamed on a micro meteorite impacting the service module although you can be the judge with the imagery Roscosmos have provided. Now there's been another leak in the coolant system this time on Progress MS-21 which is statistically highly unlikely to be another micro meteorite impact. Soyuz and Progress are different vehicles. The former is designed to take humans home and the latter is designed to burn up in the atmosphere with cargo however. They are similar enough to share the coolant system in the service module which is cause for concern with two near identical incidents in the same system in essentially the same type of spacecraft module. If this is another micro meteorite strike then it begs the question why is it only Russian service modules that are being hit? Why haven't we seen other impacts on other parts of the ISS? Or was the first leak not a micro meteorite strike and Roscosmos lied to NASA about it? Does the coolant system have a manufacturing defect? That's just some of the speculation we're seeing swirling around on the internet at the moment and NASA is going to be operating the Canada Arm 2 robotic arm to try and get a better look at the damage. They've also confirmed that the crew are in no danger which is of course the most important thing. Let's not forget what happened in 2021 with the Nauka site module firing its thrusters when it shouldn't have been or the Soyos launch incident in 2018 that saw the abort system fire up. Well this list of non-nominal incidents continue and does Russia need to step up their game when it comes to spacecraft reliability and safety? For the time being at least we'll need to play the waiting game whilst NASA asks the questions. Blue Origin's upcoming heavy lift launch vehicle New Glenn has won its first launch contract with NASA. The contract is to fly the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics explorers or Escapade mission to Mars. Comprised of two small satellites, this mission was originally scheduled to launch alongside Psyche last year. However, with that mission to delay to October 2023, the required trajectory for Escapade was no longer physically possible with a Psyche rideshare. According to NASA, Escapade is a mission designed to quote, understand the processes controlling the structure of Mars's hybrid magnetosphere and how it guides ion flows, understand how energy and momentum are transported from the solar wind through Mars's magnetosphere and understand the processes controlling the flow of energy and matter into and out of the collision or atmosphere. Now you might be thinking heavy lift launch vehicle and small satellites aren't meant to go together and you'd be right. There's a good possibility that Escapade will be flying alongside a heavier payload on New Glenn, either a customer or an internal Blue Origin payload. Or another possibility is that Escapade could just be offsetting the cost of a New Glenn test flight. NASA is handing 20 million US dollars to Blue for this flight, so they could just be killing two birds with one stone. What it doesn't mean, however, is that 2023 should be the year we start seeing more New Glenn testing if they want to be ready to launch during the 2024 Mars transfer window, which is only three weeks long. Do you think Blue Origin will be ready for the 2024 Earth Mars transfer window? Let us know what you think in the comments. It's another Blue Origin story, one which is pretty freaking cool. You see this solar cell right here? This was manufactured out of Lunar Regolith Simulant, the first step of a project run by Blue to try and create solar cells out of Lunar Regolith on the moon. This would mean that electrical energy could be produced natively with no need to rely on ships from Earth, meaning that a colony could operate independently, something that SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk has been vocal about before. Using an electrical current, iron, silicon and aluminium is separated from oxygen through a process which is called molten regolith electrolysis. All of the elements can then be used separately with the iron, silicon and aluminium for solar cells and the oxygen for life support. Molsun regolith electrolysis purifies the silicon to more than 99.999%, which according to Blue Origin is required for efficient solar cells. This process also just uses sunlight and the silicon for Blue Origin's reactor compared to the Earth-based process, which outputs, quote, large amounts of toxic and explosive chemicals. The electrolysis process also creates glass that is strong enough to protect the solar cells for over a decade, given those living and working on the lunar surface plenty of time to manufacture replacement cells. This technology has been dubbed Blue Alchemist, which Blue Origin themselves have admitted is technically ambitious, and whether they have the technology right now, I think the best tagline to take away from this incredible technology is unlimited solar power wherever we need it. They've apparently been working on this since 2021, so it proves that even though they don't talk about it too often, Blue Origin are working on some epic stuff behind the scenes. Let's head over to Space Launch Complex 40 for the first of two features during this week's space traffic. At 0132 Coordinated Universal Time on February 7th, this Falcon 9 launched Amazonus Nexus, a communication satellite from Hispersat designed to serve the Americas, Greenland and the Atlantic. The 4.5-ton payload was successfully placed into its initial geosynchronous transfer orbit, and it'll be working to secularize into its final 61-degree geosynchronous orbit. The booster supporting this mission, serial number B1073, successfully concluded its sixth flight by touching down on the autonomous spaceport drone ship, just read the instructions. The next launch was the latest Progress Resupply mission from Russia to the International Space Station, MS-22. Just to note this wasn't the leaky progress from earlier, that was MS-21. Progress MS-22 launched on this Soyuz 2.1A at 0615 UTC and 36 seconds precisely on Thursday 9th from Site-31-6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Sneaking in before Progress MS-22 arrived at the International Space Station was EOS-7, the second flight of the SSLV from India and the first successful flight of the type. Standing for Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, the SSLV is the Indian space research organization's way of trying to compete with the growing small-sat industry, which is currently dominated by New Zealand's Rocket Lab and rideshares on larger vehicles. This flight launched at 03.48 on the 10th of February from the first launch pad at the Satish Devon Space Center, delivering all 175.3 kilos of payloads to a 450km circular low-Earth orbit. At 08.45 UTC the following day, the 11th, Progress MS-22 arrived at the ISS docking to the Aftport on the Zvezda module, allowing the crew to access 1,319 kilos of dry cargo, 709 kilos of fuel, 40 kilos of compressed air, and 420 kilos of water it delivered. And with returning to Slick 40 with a world record breaking flight, a standard Starlink launch of Group 5 Mission 4. With the gap between this flight and the last Amazonas Nexus, SpaceX broke the pad turnaround time record with the launch at 05.10 UTC on February 12 being just five days, three hours, and 38 minutes later. 55 Starlink V2 mini satellites were delivered to a 298x339km 43-degree initial orbit, and they'll be raising themselves up to 530km over the coming months. Booster number B106-2 was supporting this flight, and it touched down smoothly on a shortfall of gravitas. The orbital launches you've got to look forward to are the maiden flight of the H3 rocket in the 2-2 configuration, meaning it has two engines on the first stage, with two Strap 1 solid rocket boosters, Starlink Group 2 Mission 5 from Vandenberg in Marsat 6F2 on another Falcon 9 from Slick 40 on Saturday, and during editing, Voskosmos pushed back the fast-tracked Soyuz MS-23 flight into the first 10 days of March. A big thank you to every single citizen of tomorrow, even if you're a system support member and you don't get your name in the show. Every penny contributed helps to offset the cost of Operating Station 204, where we bring you our live shows every week. If you want your name on screen at the end of every episode, make sure to head over to drawing.tomorrow.tv or the join button below. Of course financially supporting the show is not required, and it isn't expected. Just watching our content and sharing it with those who you think might also enjoy it goes a long way in growing the tomorrow community. Speaking of sharing our content, let's see what other content you can watch over the next week. On Wednesday, Dr. Tamafasco will be back with more space weather, and if you haven't seen last week's update, you need to go and check that out. There is an epic polar vortex phenomenon witnessed above the sun. It was awesome. There won't be another live show this week, sadly, but I will be back next Monday with another week's episode of Space News. For now, thanks for watching this week. Hopefully we'll see you again soon, and goodbye.