 Hello everybody and welcome to this week's edition of Tomorrow News. We've got Starbase updates, SLS updates, UK space funding, the future of insight on the surface of the red planet and so much more, so stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News, which is for the week of February 8th 2022. There's been a lot of exciting announcements and footage releases from SpaceX this week, so starting off the update we have the tweet that pretty much everyone has seen by now, which is Elon stating that this Thursday at 20 hundred central standard time on 0200 UTC on Friday, he will be presenting an update on the development of the Starship program. This is very exciting because it will be the first official update since 2019 back when Starships were still being named after Mars. We've changed conventions two times since then. Hopefully now that SpaceX have got a few years of development under their belt, this would have narrowed the trajectory of the future of the program, which should allow more accurate answers on questions about the future uses of Starship, the future variants of Starship and so on and so forth. Make sure you're subscribed because next week's news is going to be jam-packed with data from this event. Something that has definitely been confirmed for the event is that we'll be getting a full stack of Starship S20 and Super Heavy B4. The first step was completed on Sunday with the booster being taken off the transport stand by the SpaceX branded LR11000 crane and placed upon the orbital launch mount. That isn't the only development out of Starbase in the last week though as Ground Service Equipment Test Tank 4, the one that was popped a couple weeks back, has had its final remaining section cut up and sent to the scrapyard. A team within one of the production tents has been spotted by Nick and Suini and they've been attaching new tiles to a future Starship. There have also been a few new components popping up such as this ship Common Dome which will go at either the top or the bottom of one of the fuel tanks, this aft cap and a couple dome caps which are possibly for booster rate and this liquid methane tank sump which we definitely know is for booster 8 because it says so on the side. The new wide bay hasn't received any new prefabricated sections over the last week but it has got a few new beams and SpaceX could be working on something inside the structure but that's quite difficult to see from the outside. Jared Isaacman, the person who bought all four seats of the Inspiration 4 mission, went for a nice calm flight the other day taking a couple jets for a spin around Starbase. Pilot pilot John Baum joined Isaacman for the flybys, posting this cockpit video of one of the jets being flown between SN15 and SN16. I think it's a cool stunt but it certainly upsets some people on Twitter. The Dragon Recovery ships go searcher and go navigate to have both been renamed. The former now known as Megan and the latter now known as Shannon after the first two women to fly on SpaceX's crew Dragon spacecraft. The vessels are no longer listed on Juice Offshore's website which may mean that SpaceX have purchased them outright a very likely outcome. The nameplates on the ships have also both already been painted over as they await their new names officially being applied onto them. If you recall the first mission of last week's tripleheader Cosmos SkyMed had some incredible tracking footage and SpaceX has uploaded a full resolution copy of this footage in slow motion. The full video is linked in the card in the corner and I have also stabilized the footage in After Effects so the rocket remains pretty much stationary. SpaceX's new facility in Cape Canaveral has broken ground according to the latest imagery from Sentinel-2. The existing hangar X can be seen on the right side of the plot but the main focus is the square of dirt in the middle which is looking a bit like a construction site. Parachutes have been lagging a bit during the last two Dragon Splashdowns with one of the shoots on CRS-24 opening up 63 seconds after the other three and one on CRS-22 opening up 75 seconds after the other three. Officials don't believe this is a safety risk but it is something to be looked at. The main theory right now is that the first three parachutes to deploy are aerodynamically shading the fourth which leaves it struggling to inflate. The data recovered from these events are nominal with it just looking like data from a normal four parachute descent. CRS-4 and AX-1 will not be delayed at all so this issue really isn't anything to be worried about. Starlink has just received an update on the customer end with Starlink Premium now available for pre-order in most regions. The new service is designed for businesses and high demand users with a predicted speed range of 150 to 500 megabits per second download and 20 to 40 megabits per second upload and a latency of 20 to 40 milliseconds but that increase in speed does result with an increase in price. Normal Starlink is $99 a month with the upfront cost of $499 for the dish and other hardware but premium is taking that to a new level with the hardware costing $2,500 and a $500 per month charge. The increase in hardware costs is for the new larger square dish which is what will allow these higher speeds and you also get a larger router as well. It's a price increase per month of five times same with the price of the hardware but it is only a doubling in the maximum upload and download speeds but it is important to remember that this is a service designed for businesses. The internet at station 204 costs $1,000 a month because that amount of money can be charged in that area. Starlink Premium however is half that with an increase in speed as well so this service does have its use cases. RocketLab has announced that they will be opening a new space systems complex in Colorado near the current offices of one of three companies they acquired last year called Advanced Solutions Incorporated. The software company based out of Littleton has done really well over the past six months according to RocketLab CEO Peter Beck and that there has been a lot of growth with their products. The size of their offices needs to be increased so that they can meet current programs and have enough space for future ambitions. The plan with the new 3,700 square meter complex is to not only give ASI some more space to play with allowing them to hire over double their current workforce by the first half of 2023 but also to give the company some lab and production space and two mission operation centres. Colorado also has a growing space industry with a lot of talent so this move from the laboratory could pay dividends in the future. NASA's SLS has once again received some sort of delay with the roll out for the Artemis 1 vehicle for the wet dress rehearsal on LC 39B being postponed until mid-March. In December when the last delay was announced which pushed the wet dress from January to February NASA provided us with the reason for the delay which was a faulty engine controller on one of the first stages RS-25s but this time around there isn't a specific problem the team are working in the VAB to solve it's just the sheer volume of work they have to do. SLS is a big vehicle so when you need to check every detail meticulously it's going to take a while. That's also going to take a bit longer if part of your workforce is off sick with the latest wave of the Omicron variant seeing a daily case peak of 11,543 in Brevard County the local authority of the Space Coast. Because the wet dress has now been pushed to March at the earliest the launch will no longer be happening within the same month instead NASA is looking at two two-week launch windows the first of which is April 8th to April 23rd and the second is May 7th to May 21st. Once the wet dress rehearsal takes place and NASA knows all the problems they have to resolve they will then be able to set an actual launch date for Artemis 1 something which we've all been waiting for for a very very long time. The SRBs or solid rocket boosters also don't look to be posing a threat on the mission even though their original lifespan was 12 months when they were constructed last year. That number has been extended and they're still good to go in their current configuration. Lockheed Martin has just been selected by NASA to manufacture a small rocket which will transport the samples collected by the perseverance rover to a Martian orbit. It's called the master scent vehicle or MAV but sadly it isn't this MAV. It'll reach Mars via a NASA-led sample retrieval lander which will also be carrying a rover of its own developed by ESA. That rover will go and pick up the samples from perseverance and return them to the lander where they will be loaded into a container on the MAV. There is also the possibility that Percy will visit the lander as well. Once all the samples are loaded up the MAV will put itself into orbit around Mars where the Earth return orbiter developed by ESA will then grab onto the container and take it back to Earth. The contract that Lockheed has won covers the design, development, testing and evaluation of the MAV and its ground support equipment. There are no technical details on the vehicle as of yet but we do know that NASA awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman last year to develop solid fuel motors for the MAV. The NASA Associate and Administrator for Science said in a statement that committing to the Mars ascent vehicle represents an early and concrete step to hammer out the details of this ambitious project not just to land on Mars but to take off from it as well. We are nearing the end of the conceptual phase for this Mars sample return mission and the pieces are coming together to bring home the first samples from another planet. On February 1st the UK government published the Defence Space Strategy which follows on from the publication of the National Space Strategy last September. The biggest takeaway from the new strategy is that there will be an extra investment of £1.4 billion over the next decade into defence space technologies which will enhance the understanding of threats in from or through space again high quality information and intelligence to be transferred in real time from space to the military using laser communications technology and a lot more. As said that it's crucial we continue to push the frontiers of our defence space ambitions enhancing our military resilience and strengthening our nation's security and that this significant investment will help to ensure the UK remains at the forefront of space innovation and one step ahead of our competitors. £127 million of the £1.9 billion investment is going to be set aside for the development of a satellite network concept demonstrator called Minerva. This will present the UK's ability to autonomously collect, process and disseminate data from the satellites owned by the UK and its allies to support decision making on the military front line. On January 7th NASA's Insight Lander on Mars entered a save mode after a regional dust storm blocked sunlight making it solar panels redundant for about a month until normal operations resumed over the weekend but sadly normal operations may not be able to be held for long as the dust on the solar arrays are severely limiting the electricity that can be generated. In the summer of 2021 the lifespan of the lander was predicted to last until spring 2022 but that has been pushed out slightly but not by very far in fact we could only have a minimum of four months left with Insight. Unlike the rover spirit and opportunity the solar arrays aren't cleaned by atmospheric activity but the team working on the mission have still been working out ways to try and increase the power throughput. One procedure is getting the robotic arm to dig up some of the Martian soil and then drop it upwind of the arrays so that the grains will bounce off the panels and increase the generation capability by one to three percent. On top of that Insight is only funded for the rest of 2022 so it has submitted a proposal as a part of NASA's ongoing senior review on planetary science mission for an extension of the mission in the event that there is a big weather event which cleans off the solar arrays. That sort of event however is very unlikely but still not impossible. There were a few launches last week so let's take a look at some space traffic. Round two of the SpaceX Tripleheader saw NRL-87 launch atop the shiny Falcon 9 B107-1 booster from Space Launch Complex for East at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2027 UTC on February 2nd. As this is a national reconnaissance office payload we do not get a lot of data about it but historically NRL payloads have been for surveillance and reconnaissance of the United States and testing new technology. This was the second return to launch site recovery in a row for SpaceX with the booster flipping around 180 degrees performing its boost back burn flipping back around for a re-entry and then gracefully performing the hover slam on landing zone four. Round three of the SpaceX Tripleheader saw Starlink Group 4 mission 7 launch atop the not so shiny B106-1 booster from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1813 UTC the following day, February 3rd. With a total payload mass of about 14,500 kilograms the 49 Starlink satellites inside the payload fairing one half of which was flying for a record breaking sixth time were placed into their initial 338x210 kilometer 53.22 degree inclination orbit and over the coming months they'll be raising themselves to a 540 kilometer circular low earth orbit. The first and only drone ship recovery of the Tripleheader was for this mission with B106-1 touching down on a short field of gravitas approximately eight minutes after liftoff. Some suspicious movements from ASOC and support vessel Doug has caused speculation over whether or not the booster is okay but until the ship's return we won't know the answer. As I'm writing this script the drone ship and Tuxeon are still stationed in the Bahamas but Doug is sailing in the direction of Port Canaveral. We had another launch of a classified mission over the past week but this one was from the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. Launching at 0700 UTC on February 5th from Site 4334 at the possessed Cosmodrome in Russia our knowledge of the mission ends there with Roscosmos only providing us with the images you are seeing on your screen. Coming up over the next seven days we have Elena41 with Astra if it ever stops scrubbing, OneWeb13 on a Soyuz 2.1B, Nios4 on a PSLV without Mission Abit on an Electron and Progress MS Lightning on a Soyuz 2.1A. Tomorrow is a crowdfunded show and the wonderful people who help us out are the citizens of tomorrow. Once a month they donate a bit of money to us and in return we provide access to exclusive Discord channels in our public Discord server available at the link in the description, access to space news scripts as they're being written and access to the members version of the Tomorrow Live broadcasts which start about half an hour before the main show and go on for a good hour after. 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