 Welcome back everyone to another episode of Tomorrow News. We've got a lot coming up today, information around B1059, some delays around Virgin Galactic and, after winning some more contracts so, stick around as this is your Tomorrow News for the week of February 28th, 2021. We're starting off this week's show with some information on the sad end of life of B1059, which as you remember, was lost in a strange incident when coming in for landing. The short story is, heat damage caused the engine issue. The long story is, we can't know yet. To quote Hans Konigsman, a senior advisor for SpaceX, it's related to heat damage, and that's all I can say at this point in time. Let's switch it up a bit then to something that we are allowed to know, or at least something we can see for our own eyes. This is Hailey Arseneau, and the second member of the Inspiration 4 mission. When she was just 10 years old, she suffered from osteosarcoma, which was a type of bone cancer, which was affecting her knees. Because of this, her family went to the St Jude Children's Research Hospital for her treatment and her care. In 2014, she got an undergraduate degree in Spanish, and in 2016, she got her physician assistant degree. She is now an employee at St Jude Hospital, and she has said that this seat represents the hope that St Jude gave me. That is a quote very fitting for what this mission is aiming to achieve, and I, along with many others, believe that she is a very good choice for this position. She has also appropriately taken the seat's hope. The two remaining seats have been named Generosity and Prosperity, and the former being given to a donate to St Jude, and the latter being given to an entrepreneur who has started a shop using Shift for Shop. And updates about a public mission to space aren't the only big thing that happened this week. No, our friends over at Rocket Lab, they sure dropped a doozy on all of us. Currently, Rocket Lab has their patch of the small sat market cornered, but in an industry on the cusp of unleashing the full fury of satellite mega constellations for better, for worse, sticking with just a small lift launcher isn't going to cut it. Enter Neutron, just announced by Rocket Lab, a reusable medium lift launch vehicle that will be human-rated and capable of putting 8,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. That's in a gap that presently exists in the launcher market. You've got Rocket Lab's own electron capable of delivering 300 kilograms to low Earth orbit and SpaceX's Falcon 9, able to lift a little over 15,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit in its reusable mode. I am expecting some of you rocket aficionados to be like, well, actually, what about Antares? It's in that same payload category, isn't it? And I say to all of you, when was the last time Antares lifted anything other than the Cygnus freighter on the way to the International Space Station? Oh, that's right, never. However, we do see the respected and long-lived Soyuz sitting squarely in this realm being able to chuck 8,200 kilograms to low Earth orbit. If Neutron is to grab the lion's share of this market, that's your Royal currently sitting upon the throne, having sat there for the last half a century. Neutron will use a launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on the east coast of the United States, burn a mix of rocket propellant 1 and liquid oxygen, and has a first flight sometime around 2024. Now, a critical portion of Rocket Lab making Neutron possible has occurred. They have gotten about $745 million in venture funding and that's quite a bit of money, especially when you look at something like the development of SpaceX's Falcon 9, which costs about $300 million, but you really should include the Falcon 1 development cost in that total cost as well, which puts it at about $400 million. There's also another really good thing that came out of this, which is accountability. And yes, that is right, Peter Beck held himself accountable for some things that he said. Specifically, it was that he would eat his hat if they made Electron reusable and also if they would ever fly meat. And here we are in 2021 with Rocket Lab flying reusable electrons and now working on a new rocket that'll fly meat. So rightfully so, Peter chowed down on that hat. Well done, sir. Well done. That reminds me, I still have an RS-25 to eat after losing that bet about Starship with Jamie. Does anybody have a spare RS-25? However, someone not eating non-edible things presently is Blue Origin. They are chugging away on their new Glenn rocket at their factory in Cape Canaveral Florida. They've announced that the first flight of new Glenn originally scheduled for some time this year will be slipping to fourth quarter 2022 at the earliest. Their reasoning losing out on the national security space launch phase two launch services procurement, which was won by United Launch Alliance and SpaceX last year and the extra financial sting of a $500 million launch service agreement signed with the United States Air Force in 2018 being terminated early after only receiving $255 million. Their new launch pad at LC 36 has cost a billion dollars just in case you forgot that ground support equipment and infrastructure is ridiculously expensive and another $2.5 billion spread around facilities, factories, and the development of the new Glenn rocket, which Blue Origin notes that not winning the procurement contract cost them about $3 billion in revenues that could have helped. Yowza! I mean, I don't know about you, but I have a hard time thinking Blue Origin looked at that procurement competition as a make or break for them, but here we are. Although they're certainly still moving forward with new Glenn, but dang, $3 billion not accounting for that. That's just not very Blue Origin like. I'm going to wrap up by talking about something that is very much at the core of what we believe here tomorrow, which is that space is for everyone. It should not be a place that is secluded just to an elite number of humans somewhere under 600 currently that have actually made it off of the earth and into space. No, we believe that space is truly for everyone, and the European Space Agency is about to take a very, very big step to making that happen. Putting out their first call for applicants since 2009, if you would like to become an astronaut for ESA, you've got to be under the age of 50. You have to have fluency in English with additional languages spoken considered a bonus. You'll also need a master's degree plus three years of professional experience in your STEM field, or you can have experience as a test pilot. You also need a second class pilot medical certificate, and you need to be a citizen of any ESA member or associate member state. Now that all sounds very much like the expected requirements on an application to become an astronaut. So you're probably asking yourself, what's the big deal here? Well, the European Space Agency have said it themselves, which is that in this next round, they are looking to recruit an astronaut with a physical disability. Spaceflight is incredibly demanding on the human body, which means that astronauts aren't just brainy smarts. They're also expected to be in near perfect physical condition, meaning people who have physical disabilities were immediately disqualified from being able to join in. But it's not just some footnote on the application. Nope, ESA is explicitly saying that they're intending to recruit an astronaut with a physical disability. All I can say about this is that it is about time. This has been such a long time coming, and I'm glad that the European Space Agency is finally taking that step to move this forward because space brings out the best in humanity. And just because you may be physically disabled does not mean that you can't be a part of the best of humanity. So finally, going to space as we are, that is exactly what we should be doing. And I'm really looking forward to this future that this is going to bring, and opening up space to more people. Because that's what it's all about, right? We want to bring humanity along with us into space. And that's not just the peak of people, it is everyone that we can take with us. So, on that note, let's head right back to you, Ryan. NASA have handed over $7.95 million worth of cash to Astra, which will cover three launches of their Rocket 3 vehicle. The time-resolved observations of precipitation structure and storm intensity with the constellation of Small Sats mission, or tropics for short, trust me the shorter name is easier to say, will be launching between the 8th of January and 31st of July next year. The previous flight of Rocket 3 very nearly made it to orbit, so if they stick it on Flight 3, they may be set to launch the time-resolved tropics to space. Now sadly, this story is a bit sad as it involves delaying space tourism aboard a Virgin Galactic vehicle until 2022. An aborted test flight of Spaceship 2 on December 12th last year was caused by electromagnetic interference, which caused a flight computer to reboot just as the vehicle ignited its hybrid engine. That, as you can probably tell, was extremely inconvenient. The president of Virgin Galactic, Mike Moses, has said that a new flight control computer system is the likely source of the increased levels of interference, so they shielded components and prepared for a flight on February 13th where, alas, the issue cropped up again just before they got into the sky. The method now is to actually fix the flight computer itself. Now this will take a while, but once it is noticeably fixed enough in the lab and onboard the vehicle, they should be all good to resume power with test flights. The company expects this to happen in time for a flight in May. Last December is creeping up again as that is when Orbex raised 24 million US dollars, which is being used to pay AMCM or additive manufacturing customized machines to make the largest 3D printer in Europe to manufacture their rocket engines. These engines will power the Prime launch vehicle, which is composed of two stages with six biopropaid engines on the first stage and one on the second. The printer will be able to produce around 35 engines a year and it will be based around the four laser AMCM M4K4 metal printing platform. Launcher, another aspiring small-sat launcher, is also using AMCM to 3D print prototypes of their E2 engine, which will power their vehicle, creatively named Rocket 1. I'm rooting for Orbex now because I really want to see an orbital launch out of the UK for the first time ever and I especially can't wait to see how those 3D printed engines hold up. SkyAura, which is another launch company based out of Scotland, also looks to be making good progress as they've been conducting some tests recently. Talking of launches, we've had a few in the past week starting with a launch out of China. Lifting off a top along March 4C out of Site 9401 at the Jiquan Satellite Launch Centre at 0222 UTC on February 24th, the third launch of a set of YARGAN 31 satellites made their way to low Earth orbit around 1100 km above sea level. As always with Chinese spy satellites, we don't know what's actually going on up there. All we know is that 70 have been launched. February 28th saw the launch of Amazonia 1, a top-list PSLVDL or Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Lifting off at 0454 UTC, the satellite and 18 others all started their journeys towards Polar orbit. Amazonia 1 is an Earth observation satellite developed by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research and it is equipped with a camera that can take pictures of any place in the world every five days. This high rate of revisiting the same place is very useful for tracking things like deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and other environmental damages around the globe. Arctica M, a meteorology and emergency communication satellite also took to the skies on February 28th, exactly two hours and one minute later at 0655 UTC atop this, Soyuz 2.1B. Lifting off out of launch complex 316 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the second launch of Roscosmos in 2021 got off to a good start, as the first of 10 Arctica satellites is looking good in Earth orbit. And here is your space weather with Dr. Timothy Sco. We are in a wait and see mode with space weather this week. As we take a look at our Earth-facing sun, we do see a couple new bright regions on the Earth-facing disk and these are boosting the solar flux just a little bit, which is good news to amateur radio operators and emergency responders. In fact, a couple of these regions are actually even firing off little solar flares and one of them even launched a solar storm that's going to go west of Earth, so we don't have to worry about it hitting us. Meanwhile, we also have a coronal hole. It's actually a large hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth strike zone over the next couple of days and it's going to be followed by yet another coronal hole and both of these are going to give us some fast solar wind and give us more chances for aurora, which is definitely good news considering that solar storm fizzle we had the other day. So aurora photographers keep your fingers crossed because you're going to get some more chances. Now as we switch to our far-sided sun, this is Stereo A and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side. You can see those bright regions beginning to exit the west limb in Stereo's view and you can also see those two coronal holes. They're pretty well formed. So what that means is that we're going to have chances for aurora easily over this next week for an extended period kind of off and on. So that's really good news. The sad thing though is that if you look just to the west of that or the east of that, you're not going to see any bright regions in Stereo's view. So sadly what this means is that once these bright regions that are in Earth view rotate to the sun's far side, we're going to be back to a spotless sun. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see aurora and how the recent bright regions on the earth-facing disc might affect radio comms, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. And just before the last February episode is over, I want to thank all of the citizens of tomorrow for their continued support. The escape velocity, orbital, sub-orbital and ground support citizens all help out the show and keep us on the air. So if you would like to join them and support the show financially, head over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join. That's it for today again. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time. Goodbye.