 It's the changing of the guards at Starbase as booster 8 begins its test campaign and SOS has been causing controversy with incoming Hurricane Ian. This is Monday's Tomorrow Space News. It may seem like a very long time ago now, but it was only seven days ago with B7 firing seven engines, the highest concurrent number of the Starship program so far. With this successful test confirmed by SpaceX, the booster switched around at Starbase with the younger booster 8 being rolled to the launch site and the older booster 7 being taken back to the production site for quote unquote robustness upgrades. Elon later said on Twitter that these upgrades are for full engine-rud isolation. Could this mean that the engines will be receiving the blast shields we saw at McGregor last week? Let me know what you think about that. I certainly think so. It'd make perfect sense tying both these comments together. Elon Musk has also given us an update on his personal timeline for when we could be expecting the orbital flight test. November seems highly likely apparently and to be honest, I feel the same way. November or December launch seems doable depending on the speed that booster 8 goes through its test campaign. If it has any mishaps like B7 thinking squash to transfer, tube and big boom, then it may take a little longer. On this Twitter spree we also received information on the first Cape Canaveral launches of Starship which is super exciting. Elon suspects Q2 of 2023, with the hardware being shipped from the port of Brownsville to most likely the turning basin next to the LC39 press site. Not Starships being built at Roberts Road. Speaking of the orbital flight test, the ship currently slated to perform that mission. Number 24 has had its stunning Pes dispenser door welded shut with this cover. Now we don't have any official word why but it's being speculated that trying to deploy Starlink V2s on the test flights may have been a bit too ambitious and rather than try and remove the bay potentially harming the structural integrity of the vehicle it was just easier to weld it shut. We do know that this isn't the end of the Pes dispenser though, it was just a short while later, Ship 27 was having its Starlink rack lowered into its payload bay rings. Moving to GSE, the orbital launch mat has been seeing some plumbing upgrades over the last few weeks with a brand new water daily system being installed. The full system was tested for the first time on Thursday. The mist also has the secondary purpose of making some lovely rainbows. It's not just Starship that SpaceX has been testing but Starlink as well with the first aviation partner that they announced, JSX. On a flight between Burbank and San Jose the satellite interconnection was tested with a speed of over 100 megabits per second recorded which is over double what I get at zero feet, let alone 30,000. Hopefully working tests like this will encourage other airlines to join the Starlink network as although JSX and Hawaiian combined serve a lot of customers having airlines such as American or Delta on board would give many more customers a much better airborne internet experience. Also, fingers crossed, having satellite internet become more mainstream will also reduce the price for airborne internet. Wednesday's tanking test was the most successful test of the entire SLS stack since it first rolled out for the first wet dress rehearsal. All the primary and secondary objectives were met and although there was still a bit of leaky hydrogen it was a massive improvement over the issues faced during the previous launch attempts. There is a lot of hope that the September 27th launch attempt would be able to go ahead after the Space Force granted a waiver allowing SLS to fly with its pre-existing flight termination system batteries. However, Mother Nature has decided that the 27th is not the wonderful launch window that we want it to be. Due to the inaccuracy that will naturally exist in forecasting big storms, NASA kept pushing the decisions until they had better data so they knew they were making the best call possible. On Saturday, they officially confirmed that the September 27th launch attempt had been waived off but they weren't certain on whether or not SLS would roll back to the VAB. On the surface, deciding whether to roll back or not may just seem like a mundane thing but the process prior and the implications of a rollback make the decision even harder. Firstly, SLS has to be disconnected from LC-39B which is a long process then the crawler has to roll under the mobile launcher, pick up the rocket and then spend 10 hours taking it back to the VAB. Once the storm has passed the flight termination batteries would need to be replaced which would basically knock off an October attempt leaving us with November as the next launch opportunity for Artemis 1. Or NASA could leave SLS on the pad to ride out with the October 2nd launch opportunity still alive and well. So, unsurprisingly, NASA was taking their time. For the safety of their personnel, however, the preparations for a rollback were taking place so the process of disconnecting SLS from 39B would be as quick as possible if the call was to be made. Most notably, on Sunday afternoon we saw the crawler being moved under the mobile launcher. Sunday night came and the decision was announced. NASA would be waiting until Monday to make another decision. At the time of writing, there is still no final decision. Or at least there wasn't. Because NASA is fantastic with their timing, the Monday announcement was made the second I stopped recording my piece to camera. SLS will be returning to the VAB with first motion targeted for 11pm eastern time tonight. Last week, we had Ariane Space with Suzy and this week we have Rocket Lab with their not a capsule announcement. Seriously guys, they're just looking into it, promise. Based on the scale to what appears to be the US segment of the International Space Station, it looks like a similar size to Crew Dragon with a separate cargo section maybe beyond the silver seam, but that is pure speculation. That not an announcement came alongside many other Neutron updates at their Investor Day 2022 event in New York City. The major design for the first stage of the rocket is now complete, with the nine Archimedes engines now intended instead of just seven. The same can be said for the second stage, although that only has one Archimedes engine for the final push to orbit. The faring design of Neutron has also been simplified, moving from a full-petal design to just two halves which open up. Speaking of the Archimedes engine, we have some new data on that as well. The sea level engines on the first stage will each be capable of 734 kN of thrust with a specific impulse of 329 seconds. For comparison to SpaceX's latest version of the Merlin, which powers the Falcon 9, which is pretty much Rocket Lab's main rival with Neutron, that has a maximum thrust of 845 kN with a specific impulse of 282 seconds. Rocket Lab also announced that they'd be testing the Archimedes engine at NASA's Stennis Space Centre in Mississippi on the A3 test stand. This stand started construction in 2007 and it was initially designed for testing of the J2X engine, which would have been used on the Ares family of rockets for the constellation program. With the cancellation of that, however, A3 no longer served a purpose. It does now however. We also had this render released, which is what Rocket Lab thinks launch-powered two at the Mid-Atlantic regional spaceports in Virginia will look like. Most interestingly though, what do we have here? Could this be a Rocket Lab drone ship? Peter Beck said previously that marine assets were very expensive, but he's eaten his hat before. Literally. And what's this figure here? 15 tonnes expendable, 8 tonnes return to launch site, but what does 13 tonnes reusable mean? Could we be seeing Rocket Lab marine assets after all? This is a very interesting topic, so I'd be very interested to see what you lot think in the comments down below and also how many more hats Peter should eat if this does come to fruition. And finally, before we get into some launches, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is scheduled for impact with Dimorphos, affectionately called Diddymoon, at 2314 UTC today, September 26th. On the 11th of September, Lissia Cube, an Italian Cube sat riding alongside DART, was released from the primary payload. It'll be following DART as it approaches Dimorphos, staying at a safe 55km distance, giving us a third-person perspective on the impact. Diddymos and Dimorphos is a binary asteroid system with the latter orbiting around the former. The aim of this collision is to slow the orbit of Dimorphos, making it smaller. The collision is expected to slow Dimorphos' orbit by only 0.4mm per second, but over the course of several weeks, this will become even more apparent, eventually ending up with an orbital period, how long it takes to orbit the host body 10 minutes shorter than what it is currently. It's a busy week for traffic starting off with Yunhai 103. This environmental satellite launched at 2315 UTC on Tuesday, the 20th of September, from launch Area 4 at the Zhiyuquan Satellite Launch Center in China. As usual with Chinese launches, that's all we know. Next up, it's time for another ISS crew. Soyuz MS-22 launched at 1354 UTC on September 21st, from Site-31-6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Commanding the mission is Serkei Prokopyev, with Flight Engineer 1 Dimitri Patelin and Flight Engineer 2 Francisco Rubio alongside him. Rubio is flying on this mission from NASA as a part of the Seed Swap Agreement between the US Agency and Roscosmos. Following a classic Soyuz speedrun, MS-22 docked to the airport on the Rassvet module at 1706 UTC just over three hours after launch. This mission is expected to last for six months, with the planned end of mission date currently set as the 28th of March next year. This next launch is the end of an era, as at 2225 UTC, on September 24th, we witnessed the last ever Delta launch from Vandenberg. Specifically for this flight, NROL-91, it was the beast that is the last of the deltas, the self-firelighting Delta IV Heavy. The host to this magnificent sight was Space Launch Complex 6, and as this was a secret mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, our knowledge of this mission ends there. It is suspected that the payload is Keyhole 11, a satellite which is similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of looking at pretty stars and galaxies, it looks at the Earth. Back to China we go for a launch of the Kuai Xiao 1A rocket. This mainly solid fuel rocket carried Cheyenne 14 and Cheyenne 15 from the Tianan Satellite Launch Center. A common theme for this week as these two payloads were classified government satellites. Of course, we have our standard Starlink launch, which we do now pretty much every week. Launching just after the last Vandenberg Delta at 2332 UTC from Slik 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Group 435 had 52 satellites headed for their initial 337x232km 53.22degrees low Earth orbits. B1073 successfully concluded its fourth flight supporting a mission, landing on a shot full of gravitas. What's coming up over the next few days? An unknown payload on a Long March 2D from China, then potentially the maiden flight of the Zuka 2 rocket, which would make it the first methane-powered rocket to orbit, assuming it gets that far. Fireflies return to flight with To the Black from Vandenberg, Slik 2 West and Atlas V in the 531 configuration on Friday from the Cape, with a potential Starlink flight an hour afterwards as well. Thank you to all the citizens of tomorrow who helped to make this show financially possible. 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