 It's a new week and we have a new Starship update from Elon Musk, Starlinks being destroyed by space weather, Jared Isman funding three new flights, Astra with a sticky fairing, James Webb's first images, space traffic and a whole lot more exciting stuff, so stay tuned as this is your episode of Tamari News, which is for the week of February 15th, 2022. To say it has been quite a week for SpaceX would be an understatement and they didn't even launch anything. We had the first official Starship update since 2019, another Starship delay, a new commercial space program using SpaceX vehicles, the latest batch of Starlinks satellites getting caught up in a geomagnetic storm and the correction of an honest mistake with the Falcon 9 second stage which launch discover no longer being believed to be the object that will collide with the moon next month. Checking off the first item on that list, let's dive into the nitty-gritty of the update from Elon Musk. Just to note, pretty much all of the measurements listed in the presentation were imperial, so if some of the numbers I read sound a bit off, it's because I've converted them into metrics so I can actually understand them. So far in human history, 14,077 metric tons of mass has made it to orbit. Musk believes that with Starship launching three times per week, 14,061 tons can be launched within just one year. That is only 16 tons shy of our total as a species on one type of vehicle over just 156 launches. The payload capacities have been updated again with 91 tons being the predicted capacity to a quote-unquote useful orbit as well as to Mars and 136 tons predicted to be the capacity to a low Earth orbit. That 91 ton figure could be extended up to 181 however with the introduction of orbital refilling. Elon kept pointing out that it would be refilling and not refuelling which would be taking place as there is 3.5 times more liquid oxygen than liquid methane, the actual propellant. The goal is to test orbital refilling by the end of 2023 and Elon said he would be surprised if it took more than two years from now to test it out. The update back in 2019 was before Raptor 1 had even done a flight on a full blown Starship prototype so getting new information on Raptor 2 was very exciting. Audience members at Starbase were able to get relatively up close and personal with Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 and I believe this might be the closest that members of the public have ever been able to get to the engines so far so we got some cool photos such as this one from Jack Byer. In case it wasn't obvious Raptor 1 is on the right with Raptor 2 on the left and it is clear as daylight that the plumbing on the next generation engine has been trimmed down by a substantial amount and it is going to be trimmed down even more hopefully reaching a stage where the engine no longer requires protective shrouding. SpaceX then later tweeted this video of Raptor 2 in testing and you don't need numbers to tell you that this is one beast of a rocket engine. Raptor 1 ran at 1814 kN of thrust at sea level but Raptor 2 is taking that to a brand new level. At 2256 kN level a similar number to the Space Shuttle and SLS RS-25 main engines but that's only where Raptor 2 currently is. In fact Elon Musk is confident that 2452 kN can be achieved. As you can imagine something that powerful is going to get quite hot nuclear power station hot so the only issue SpaceX now has to deal with is the fact that Raptor 2 really likes to melt its combustion chamber. Elon also revealed his dislike of flanges with him revealing that a lot of them have now been converted to welds. The better performance from Raptor 2 will also be a key part of the proposed abort mode for Starship with Elon stating that something that would make sense is to have the thrust to weight ratio of the ship be enough that it could if required escape the pad all by itself and escape the booster during flight. That would only work with the nine engine version of Starship though and even if that dropped to eight during flight an abort would still be possible. That doesn't negate any issues around the ship itself so if there was a failure with one of the tanks inside the ship you screwed but it does deal with the booster. The launch site and the ongoing FAA environmental review were also discussed both by Elon and by members of the audience during the Q&A session and we got some interesting updates on that as well. If the environmental review is passed and SpaceX is allowed to fly within the next few months Starbase will be the primary research and development location but also launching payloads such as Starlink. The Kennedy Space Center on the other hand will be the primary launch site with the pad currently being constructed at LC39A as well as the proposed pads at LC49. After the event on February 14th the FAA did announce another delay to the completion of the environmental review with the estimated completion date being pushed by a month to March 28th. This isn't expected to start the process of moving to the Cape though as it is only a delay of 28 days. If the environmental review is delayed significantly however then the Cape can become the favorite for the orbital flight test as SpaceX already has the appropriate approval to operate Starship out of 39A. SpaceX also has their offshore Spaceports, Phobos and Demos which are decommissioned oil rigs. One of these will be receiving its own fully kitted out orbital launch tower mount and cat charms before the end of this year which is just over 10 months away. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out considering it took SpaceX 13 months to get to the point where they are today with the Starbase orbital launch pad. We didn't get any updates on the interior of the ship but we did get some information on the life support systems and there are two routes that SpaceX can take. The first route for one to two week long missions would be skagging up Dragon's life support system but that would not be possible with longer trips to Mars. For that kind of journey length a new system would need to be developed which is renewable recycling as much as possible in a closed-loop system. And with that this year's update was complete and we still don't know if Booster 4 and Ship 20 will be repairing which takes Starship orbital for the first time. How on Earth someone didn't ask that? I do not know. Keeping kind of on the topic of life support, Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift for Payments and the person who funded the Inspiration for Mission has just announced a new commercial human spaceflight program called Polaris. Its main goal is to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities whilst also raising funds and awareness for important causes on earth. Consisting of up to three missions the program will demonstrate new technologies, conduct extensive research and host the first ever crewed flight on Starship. Mission 1 which has been named Dawn is launching no earlier than Q4 of this year with a maximum duration of five days in orbit. That orbit isn't just going to be bog-standard orbit however this Dragon's performance is being pushed to its limits to try and reach the highest ever orbit the crew has flown since the Apollo era. During those five days the crew will also be conducting research on their health such as using ultrasound to contribute to studies on human prevalence to decompression sickness, gathering data on the radiation environment and how that affects themselves, something important as the spacecraft will be travelling through parts of the Van Allen radiation belt and they'll be collaborating with a large number of universities and laboratories. Polaris Dawn will also make history by being the first crew to test the laser starlink network giving SpaceX not only data on the performance of their current network but also data which can help the development for a system designed for communications to the moon, Mars and beyond. That's not all however as the cherry on top of the very delicious cake is that the first ever commercial spacewalk will be taking place on this mission. As an altitude of about 500 kilometers the crew will attempt this historic EVA using a new type of EVA spacesuit designed by SpaceX. Little is known about these suits at this time but what we do know is that they are upgraded from the current IVA suits used by everyone who has flown in Dragon. That's all very exciting but for this to be a crewed program we need a crew which is what I'm now going to talk about. Of course Jared Isakman is going to be the commander of Dawn and it will not only be his second spaceflight but his second time behind the wheel or should I say touchscreens of the Dragon spacecraft. Also making him the only person to fly on Dragon twice. The pilot for the mission will be Scott Petit a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who has served in various other roles such as being Director of Business Development at Dracon International, the Private Air Force which Isakman founded, Vice President of Strategy at Shift 4 and the Mission Director of Inspiration 4. Sara Gillis, a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX will be the mission specialist of the flight. She is responsible for overseeing the astronaut training program at SpaceX training Bob Benkin and Doug Hurley for Demo 2, the crew of Crew 1 and the crew of Inspiration 4. Crew member number four is Anna Mennon who will be the medical officer of the mission. She is also a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX where she manages the development of crew operations and serves in mission control as both a mission director and a crew communicator. Before working for SpaceX she worked at NASA for seven years as a biomedical flight controller for the International Space Station. For now this is pretty much all we know but we should be expecting some exciting updates soon as the dawn of Polaris is only a few months away. That was quite an exciting and uplifting story but now to something a bit more disappointing as the majority of the satellites launched on SpaceX's last Starlink mission have been lost to a geomagnetic storm. SpaceX intentionally launches their Starlink missions to a very low orbit where the atmospheric drag is relatively high so if something goes wrong with a satellite it will soon de-orbit and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere upon re-entry. A geomagnetic storm the day after the launch heated up the atmosphere causing the density of the part of the atmosphere where the Starlink satellites were orbiting to increase up to 50% higher than what had been observed on previous missions. So how did this event heat up the atmosphere? Here's Dr. Tammeth Ascove to explain it. So why did a minor space weather event post such a major problem for the Starlink satellites? Well space weather is still very much the wild wild west of weather and predictions aren't always what they seem. In fact sometimes a prediction of a single solar storm ends up being a series of solar storms and that's exactly what happened with this particular event. In fact we had multiple solar storms in rapid succession and when we have these solar storms some of them are aligned exactly the opposite of one another and when that happens if you think of the Earth's atmosphere as like a flywheel one of the solar storms the first one spun the atmosphere up just like this. But then the other one wanted to turn around and reverse that motion so what happens the second solar storm had to slow down that atmosphere stop it and reverse it and when you do that you cause a lot of friction and a lot of heating and that seemed to be one of the magic ingredients that may have caused this minor series of events to become a major problem. Because of this storm SpaceX commanded the satellites to fly edge on in their orbits like if you're sticking your hand out the window of your car it's easier to hold it in an edge on position as the surface area that the atmosphere is hitting is smaller. Sadly though this wasn't enough the increased drag prevented the satellites from leaving safe mode which would allow them to start their orbit raising maneuver. Up to 40 of the satellites have already deorbited or will deorbit soon which will be costly for SpaceX but it also demonstrates the length that they go to stop dead styling satellites from clogging up the sky. If you dismissed space weather before hopefully this incident will make you pay better attention to how important it actually is. We've had Dr. Tamatha Scove with her space weather segment in our new show since its inception because it is super important that we better our understanding of what it is and how it can affect us. She did a whole live briefing on the matter last week going into more detail than I ever could so if you want to check it out which you definitely should it's popped up in the corner of your screen. Two shows ago at the start of the month I covered the reports that the Falcon 9 second stage which supported the discover mission to L1 was going to collide with the moon at the start of next month but now with more detailed observations this report has been corrected. The object being tracked is actually the booster used for China's Chenye 5T1 lunar mission. This is an honest mistake and maybe now the questions will be raised on whether there should be better tracking for objects in high earth orbits around the earth. If we're going to be flying cruise to the moon within the next few years we don't want any accidents that cause loss of life. The US Space Force uses radar which is in relative terms near sighted. It can see a small object in a low orbit but it can't see a rocket stage in a high orbit. It'd be nice to see the big government agencies doing a better job at tracking these objects but that's just my opinion. Since the Starship update not much has happened down at Starbase and this segment is already ridiculously long so I'll just leave you with this footage from Elon Musk of ship 20 being taken off booster 4 by the chopsticks. There are suspicions that we could be getting a cryogenic proof test from B4 soon as liquid methane has been loaded into the orbital tank farm. Virgin Galactic have changed their logo and updated their brand to go alongside with the announcement that from February 16th anybody can go onto their website and buy a ticket. In my opinion this new typeface is a massive downgrade from their previous logo. The old font was suited so much better to a futuristic brand identity and this new one just looks like something a bit less serious and comedic. I can understand moving away from the weird blue eyeball thing and I do like the ship design but at least use one colour. The purple they've used is so rich and I've just thrown a pink radial gradient on it. So if you can't tell I don't really like it but if that's the route they want to take then so be it. I just think it looks a bit more like a school art project than the logo for an aerospace company flying humans into space. Of course that is just my opinion so I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter in the comments down below. The more substantial news however is that ticket sales are opening and it'll only take $450,000 of your hard-earned cash to get a ride on a Virgin Galactic vehicle. That does include the deposit which is a smooth $150,000 which you can give to them by heading over to virgingalactic.com and registering your interest. Or you can keep watching this video and this week's Space Traffic. We're starting off Space Traffic with OneWeb13, the main competitor to Starlink which lifted off at 1809 UTC on February 10th from EOS at the Guyana Space Center in French Guyana on top of a Soyuz 2.1B operated by Ariane Space. All 5,015 kilograms worth of the 34 satellites were successfully delivered to their initial 450 kilometer 87.4 degree inclination polar orbits and they'll be raising themselves to a finer orbit of about 1,200 kilometers. Next up is the delayed launch of Elena 41 on Astra's Rocket 3, launching from the Cape for the first time specifically slick 46 at 20,000 coordinated universal time on the same day, February 10th, everything went smoothly until the first stage had expended all of its fuel. Then, according to the onboard cameras, it seems like the fairing tried to jettison with a little bit of light leaking through, then the second stage engine started causing the stage to bump into the fairing and then finally the fairings did separate but to a second stage that was tumbling out of control for the rest of its journey back to Earth. This resulted in the loss of all 4 satellites on board from the Johnson Space Center, University of California, New Mexico State University and the University of Alabama. India kicked off their 2022 launch campaign with EOS 4, a remote sensing satellite, launching atop a PSLV rocket from Launch Pad 1 at a Satish Devan Space Center at 029 UTC on February 14th. This is their first launch since last August when they carried EOS 3, which was unsuccessful. It's good to see ISRO returning to fight with a successful launch and hopefully they'll be launching a bit more often in the two or three times per year in 2022. February 15th at 04.25 UTC saw Progress MS-19 launch atop a Soyuz 2.1A from Launch Complex 31-6 and a Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On board is about 2,550 kilograms of cargo and it is expected to dock to the Zenith port on the Poisk module of the International Space Station in a couple of days time on February 17th. Coming up over the next seven days, we have another ISS resupply in the form of Cygnus CRS-2 NG-17 and starting Group 4, Mission 8. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tana Fascoe. Solar cycle 25 is ramping up and that means the space weather is getting busy. As we take a look at our Earth-facing disk, we've got a couple eruptions on the Sun's West Limb. Don't worry, those solar storm eruptions are not Earth-directed so we don't have to worry about that. We've also had a couple mini solar storm launches in around center disk. Those are probably too small to affect Earth all that much or give us any big solar storming so we don't have to worry about any big solar storms this week, likely. And we do have a couple finger-like coronaholes. One of them has been sending us some fast solar wind but that solar wind is waning right now. The next one won't send us some fast solar wind for probably another six or seven days. Man, I've brought six days and that might give us a little bit of solar storming but not too much. We can kind of put down our cameras for a little while and Starlink can kind of just go, oh my goodness, thanks for the breather, right? But meanwhile as we take a look at the East Limb of the Sun, we do have more active regions that are going to be rotating into Earth View. In fact, as we take a look at the Sun from our far-sided monitor, this is Stereo A and it's looking at the Sun just a little bit from the side. You can see a couple of those active regions on the East Limb and Stereo's View. Those are going to be rotating into Earth View over the next couple days so we are going to continue to have the risk for big solar flares and for solar storms that will be launched. And that means could be issues for more space traffic. For more details on this week's Space Weather, including how those series of solar storms this past week caused issues for Starlink using the flywheel effect, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. As we reach the end of the show here are all the very generous citizens of tomorrow. They contribute to the show financially every month and receive some cool perks such as exclusive Discord channels, access to scripts as they're being written and the ability to watch the tomorrow live pre and post show broadcasts. 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