 Hello everybody and welcome to November's last edition of Tomorrow News. We've got Starship updates with vehicle production ramping up, a rocket lab update, some good news for JWST and a lot of space traffic. So stay tuned as this is your episode of Tomorrow News, which is for the week of November 30th, 2021. Diving straight into the deep end this week, if you can see what I did there, Eric X on Twitter has provided our rise the pleasure of viewing this fantastic render of a Starship making a water landing. Replying on Twitter, Elon Musk said that the likelihood of the early Starships breaking apart on impact with the sea was high and that just getting to the orbital velocities required to fly from Boca Chica to Hawaii for a long way round would be a big accomplishment in itself. Down at Starbase over the past few months, vehicle development has been significantly slower when compared to the development and construction of the ground service equipment, and that was because the team were gearing up for the next phase of Starship development. SpaceX now have a sub-orbital proven vehicle as well as a lot of high-tech infrastructure, so they can be confident in ramping back up the Starship and Super Heavy production lines. We are going to start off by talking about some GSC, however, as this new mechanism has been attached to the quick disconnect arm. This hood has also been spotted, which will protect the booster quick disconnect system from getting damaged under the flames of a lot of Raptor engines, all firing at full thrust. The wide bay is still under construction, with one of the cranes being positioned inside of the building. The orbital launch mount, which will hold the entire Super Heavy Starship stack before it launches, has been seen venting again by Boca Chica Gao, as well as one of NASA spaceflight's robotic cameras. This is most likely just another plumbing test, so the team can make sure there are no leaks in the system. A delivery of liquid nitrogen was accepted at the tank farm, one of several over the last week, which has also been receiving some updates of its own. Nitrogen wasn't the only element delivered that day, however, as a truckload of helium showed up, which is what is going to be used to help start up the Raptor engines. Speaking of Raptor engines, let's actually look at some vehicle stuff. Some sections of Ship 22 have been spotted stacking up in the mid-bay alongside S21, and the reason we know it's S22 parts is because SpaceX has helpfully taped a sign to it, telling us so. A flap has been seen on a trailer, which could be for Ship 22 or any future vehicles, but it's probably for S22. Speaking of flaps, there are also some aero covers, which cover the connection between the flap and the fuselage of the vehicle to make it more aerodynamic. There are a lot of barrel sections laying around the production site, and I mean a lot. Hopefully these will all be used quickly to construct whatever is needed to be constructed. Also, Booster 6's common dome has been flipped over. Work has been taking place on the aft flaps of Ship number 20, and I'm not really sure what they're doing, you can't really see, but I'm going to assume it is important because, well, it probably is. A crew has been sent up to the bottom of Booster 4 to work near the helium tanks, which like I said earlier, helped to spin up the Raptors, and it looks like they've been working on those systems. Near the top of the company, there has been a bit of a shake-up, with two vice presidents and one senior director departing. VP of mission and launch operations Lee Rosen has left SpaceX after joining them in 2013. Senior director of mission and launch operations Ricky Lim has also left. VP of propulsion Will Heltzley has also left because of a reported lack of progress with the Raptor engine development. Jake McKenzie is now going to be leading the development and production of Raptor into the future. Elon Musk is also apparently angry because of the lack of progress with Raptor development, with strong words being used in an email which was sent company-wide. The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago. We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year, and we need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster. These Raptor problems will also cause a knock-on delay for the company's other projects, such as StarLengar's version 2 of the satellites cannot be flown on Falcon, so it seems like that leadership shake-up has really shook the company. Don't worry though, SpaceX won't actually go out of business because they don't fly a starship every two weeks next year. Elon himself has said that the first orbital flight test is expected to be in January or even February. This email's main purpose really was to share the pressure that SpaceX is under to keep the current timeline without scaling back operations which are currently not making a profit. We heard last week that JWST had a little problem with the clamp bands which are used to attach it to the Ariane 5's payload adapter and that the launch had been pushed by four days to December 22nd. Well, we have received news from NASA that the space telescope is all okay, no damage has been taken and that day it can be held. Fueling for James Webb has also been given the go-ahead, which is a good sign towards launching on time with the current schedule. Rocket Lab has been practicing its booster recovery for the last three launches, with the most recent launch being the final rehearsal, with the helicopter monitoring the descent of the booster carefully, all the way down to Splashdown, but for the next launch, Electron hopefully won't end up in the sea. CEO Peter Beck has said that the last flight which introduced several upgrades to the vehicle was the final piece of the puzzle and that the heat shield on the bottom of the booster looked a lot better than on previous flights, but this first mid-air recovery won't be for a while. The most precise state we have so far is the first half of next year, 2022, but at least we do get to see this splendid new paint job in the meantime, which is actually there for a purpose. It's a new upgraded thermal protection system. There will also be flights where the booster isn't recovered between now and the recovery flight. It also seems like the company has ditched the idea of putting the booster on a boat, instead of placing the booster onto a ship once it's been caught by the helicopter, they're just going to use a bigger helicopter and return the booster to land, as it is cheaper to operate a big helicopter than a little helicopter, sort of, and a ship. Also, I'd recommend making a note in your diaries as at 1300 UTC on December the 2nd, an update event is happening on Neutron, which apparently has kept the company busy. That's all your main news, so let's have a look at some space traffic. The first launch to cover this week is an interesting one. It's DART, which stands for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which launched out of Slick for East at Wadenberg Space Force Station at 0621 Coordinated Universal Time on November the 24th. This mission is the first so-called kinetic impactor, which means it's going to collide with the asteroid Didymos B, otherwise known as Dimorphos, at a speed of around 6.6km per second. Italy is piggybacking DART with Lissia Cube, a CubeSat that will deploy 10 days before the impact and monitor the debris field. Just to clarify, because a lot of people aren't, this asteroid has no imposing threat to Earth, and the reason that this one was chosen was because of that very reason. NASA doesn't want to accidentally end life on Earth, as we know it, because their measurements were wrong. Definitely not looking at you, Mars climate orbiter. B1063 has also successfully returned to land after a smooth touchdown on Of Course I Still Love You. Next up is the launch of this Soyuz 2.1B, and inside of that payload firing was the Uzlovoy module Pre-Chao, also known as the Pre-Chao Node Module, which lifted off from launch complex 31-6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 13060 UTC on November the 24th. This module did dock to the International Space Station, but there are a lot of things that happened between the launch and the docking, so let's have a look at those first. Firstly, Cheyenne 10 launched the top of this Kauai-Zhe 1A rocket at 2341 Coordinated Universal Time on the same day from the Zhiguang Satellite Launch Center in China. The payload is designed to be used with land surveillance, urban planning, crop yield estimation, and a few other bits and bobs. Secondly, the launch of Cosmos 2552, otherwise known as EKS-5, on another Soyuz 2.1B, which launched at 0109 UTC the next day, November the 25th, from Site-43-4 at the Pleasite Cosmodrome in Russia. According to official sources, the satellite is healthy as it was placed into its desired Moldier orbit. Moving up to the ISS, we then had the undocking of Progress MS-17 at 1122 UTC on the same day from New Yorkers in the Deer Port. With this undocking, the vehicle also carried with it a part of New Yorker's docking mechanism, which was designed for the crew and cargo vehicles. That may sound strange, but it does make sense as we return to our good old friend Pre-Chao, which docked to the port that Progress undocked from at 1519 UTC on the 26th of November. Because Progress MS-17 removed the special adapter, the passageway between Nailka and Pre-Chao would now actually be wider than it would have been. Four ports are currently uncovered and the fifth will be revealed once that Progress spacecraft that carried it to the station is removed. The next launch to come from China is this Long March 3B, which was the vehicle that carried China sat 1D into orbit, gifting off at 1640 UTC on November 26th from the Zhichang Satellite Launch Center. The communication satellite is a part of the second generation of Chinese military commsats and data relay satellites. Coming up over the next seven days, we have launch three of Starland Group 4, two Galileo satellites and STP-3 on an Atlas V. And here is your space weather with Dr. Tampasco. Space weather this week is definitely keeping us on our toes. As we take a look at our earth-facing sun, you can see lots of bright regions in the southern hemisphere and this is good news for amateur radio operators and emergency responders because these regions are boosting that solar flux and keeping radio propagation in the marginal range on Earth's day side. And it looks like those conditions will continue for at least the rest of this week. The nice thing is though that these regions are not flare active, so we don't have to worry about big radio bursts, bothering radio communications on Earth's day side. Now as we also take a look, you can see several finger-like coronal holes. These coronal holes are going to be bringing us some fast solar wind. We've got one pocket that's going to be over the next couple days and then we're going to wait a little bit and we're going to get another pocket from that crescent-like shaped coronal hole that should be bringing us some some fast solar wind probably around the latter half of the first week of December and this could bring Aurora possibly down to mid-latitudes for a short period of time. And then there's one other cool thing is that on the 29th, whoosh! Do you see that? That was a solar storm that was launched. Now this solar storm is actually launched to the south of us and you can see that in the coronagraph images. You can see this almost partial halo that goes to the south, but this solar storm looks like it might actually have its northern tip gray's earth sometime around late on the second or into the third and we'll definitely talk more about that in a minute. Meanwhile, as we go and take a look at our far-sided sun, this is Stereo-A, and it's looking at the sun just a little bit from the side. You can see that big finger-like crescent coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the earth strike zone here over the next, you know, week or so and that's going to be the fast wind chaser for that solar storm and then if we take a look behind it we see a little bit of activity both in the north and in the south and these are new bright regions likely going to be reasonably quiet and probably not big flare players but they will continue to boost that solar flux so radio propagation should remain pretty good on earth day side. Switching to our prediction model Enlil. Now this is NASA's version of the model and you're looking down at the sun from the north pole with earth being off to the right and as you take a look you can see that solar storm being launched you can tell it's not a super strong storm as a matter of fact as we step off and you can actually see the north-south cut you can see that the storm is actually moving off to the south just the northern tip of it is going to graze earth but remember we also have that coronal hole with that fast solar wind and that could actually push this storm even further south so it might actually miss earth completely but nonetheless if it actually does graze earth it should happen sometime afternoon on the second and possibly into the third but we're not expecting a big disturbance but if you are an aurora photographer and you're dedicated and you want to take a chance well we do have a possibility for aurora. For more details on this week's space weather including how that solar storm may affect you come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Before this week's show comes to an end let's thank all the citizens of tomorrow for their continued support. If you think you'll enjoy exclusive live pre and post live show broadcasts as well as reading the space news scripts before the show's a reave and shot then head on over to youtube.com forward slash tmro, forward slash join or just press the join button below to join the escape velocity orbital, sub-alert or all ground support citizens today. If you want to feed the algorithm and keep happy consider pressing all the buttons that do good things below so you don't miss another episode of the news or our next live show but for now thank you so much for watching and goodbye.