 Hello, citizens of Earth and welcome to Station 204. So glad to have you aboard with us for this episode of Tomorrow News. Ryan's gonna be doing some hops. We're gonna talk about pops tomorrow. And I'm gonna be talking about NASA wanting a little bit of money. I mean, you need that to make spaceflight work. We've also got a Martian and Space Weather Update from Dr. Tammethascove, and I'll have a little Venanza to wrap it all up. Just wanna let all of our viewers know that tomorrow, on tomorrow, we are gonna be putting out a special about the recent discovery of the signature possibility of life on Venus. So if you wanna know everything about it, prepare yourself, because we have got quite an in-depth video coming out about that tomorrow. Also, just wanna remind you if you like what we do here tomorrow, don't forget, you can subscribe to us. You can set up notifications. You can like our videos. You can comment below. You can share us everywhere that you can. It is all appreciated. So let's go ahead and get started with your doubleheader for this weekend with tomorrow news for September 26, 2020. Ryan, what's happening? So the weather in the area where the drone ship is currently located means that Starlink 12 was not able to launch, which I believe is the first time we've had a scrub because of the recovery hardware not being safe enough to land on. SpaceX have also contacted the FCC to ask them if they can add 10 Starlink user terminals to its fleet of boats. If this goes ahead, it would give them more platforms to test on in turn, speeding up the progress of learning the system and shrinking the amount of time before I could get my hands on some sweet, sweet, super fast bandwidth. As well as asking the FCC for permission to test Starlink, SpaceX have also filed for a 20 kilometer hop with a net date of October 11th. This means that one of these beasts, SN8, could be flying up to 60,000 feet in under one month's time. Elon has confirmed via Twitter that the flaps and nose cone should be complete in around one week's time. So all that is needed after that is a static fire, some checkouts, another static fire and fly. The Boca Chica team tried to burst SN7.1 the other day, but it just wouldn't budge. So after some venting and some very poor weather, SN5 and SN6 were moved into the high bay where the super heavy booster will be built when Starship is heading straight for orbit. Thanks, Ryan. I'm especially excited for those really high hops. I just really wanted to see Starship flying up super high and coming back down. Now, another thing that excites me is money. And I noticed that the more money I have, the more excited I get. And not only that, I get even more excited when I'm allowed to spend that money, say, on a nice watch or some sweet shoes for my current collection or a black market TVR Sagras. Now, I mean, who doesn't like money, right? NASA definitely wants to have some money. That's kind of how you make things work. And we've been waiting to hear about how much Artemis is actually going to end up costing. And finally, the transparency is revealed as to how much it will be, $28 billion. With the current plans, NASA has to return to the moon by the end of 2024. That chunk of change will carry the Artemis program through to fiscal year 2025, which starts October 1st, 2024. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was very forthcoming to the Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, noting that the House did provide $600 million for the human landing system in a spending bill past in July, but that amount fell short of the requested $3.2 billion. And Jim was able to make sure to emphasize that it was actually needed to keep Artemis on schedule. The committee then spoke no more on the potential budgetary shortfall that could cost Artemis landing on schedule in 2024. Instead, they started talking about other things, such as the zeroing of NASA's education department and asking if that was an okay thing. Now, it's important to note that a lot of the things they asked about were requests from the executive branch's budget, and they ended up getting overturned by Congress later when it was put up to them. One nice thing to see, though, was a bipartisan effort to make this happen. Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, who's the chairman of the subcommittee, and Senator Gene Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who's the ranking member of the subcommittee, complimented each other's efforts to move the funding bill forward together and both expressed mutual frustration at its stalling. Spaceflight is one of the few policy points here in the United States that has enjoyed universal bipartisan support since its inception. But just because the United States is currently at a budget impasse does not mean things are stalled. Lunar Gateway is currently moving ahead on schedule, and they are beginning to look for landing sites for Artemis III under the gaze of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's telescope. Assembly of the Lunar Gateway sees its power and propulsion element along with the habitation and logistics outpost launched together in 2023 to potentially support Artemis III in 2024. But it's not a requirement. Artemis III, which is the mission that will land on the Moon for the first time, may very well move ahead without using Lunar Gateway, just a straight descent to the surface of the Moon for Artemis' first landing. There were some murmurs as to moving the potential landing site for Artemis III, shifting away from the Southern Polar area to somewhere near an Apollo landing site, maybe going and looking at the equipment and seeing how it handled that time in the lunar environment. But NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine quashed that. He said, nope, we're gonna stay right where we wanna go at, which is the Southern Polar regions on the Moon. However, that's all bupkus if the budget gets held up. Jim Bridenstine has made it very clear that funding for the human landing system can't just be the full $3.2 billion. That money needs to show up on time. And that means before the end of 2020. He did say that they could potentially push that as late as March, 2021 and still not impact the schedule, but obviously that would be less than ideal. Even though Artemis is kinda getting juggled around right now due to the big question mark called budget, that's still not stopping the three companies that are working on their proposals for the human landing system. SpaceX is presently not saying much. They're probably in head down work hard mode for designing a version of Starship for Lunar use. The national team, which involves Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper delivered a full-size mockup of their lander at NASA's Johnson Space Center for Evaluation. The third company, Dynetics, announced something very cool, both figuratively and literally about their lander proposal. It's gonna be gunning for one of the holy grails of spaceflight, which is in space cryogenic propellant refueling. Dynetics and lander being able to refuel would be a huge advantage. After all, it only drops a few propellant tanks on descent. And I mean, it's no SpaceX Lunar Starship reusing everything, but it's certainly serviceable. Dynetics has even said that you could harvest something such as oxygen, fill the tanks with that so they have liquid oxygen, and not head back to orbit but just hop to other locations on the lunar surface. That's a pretty cool feature. And not everyone is thrilled about current parts of lunar exploration that are underway. NASA's Office of the Inspector General has some grievances with the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. Using the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program as a basis in 2018, NASA began the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program to assist several aerospace companies in developing small landers to carry payloads to the moon on a relatively fast time scale and at a relatively low budget, accepting the risks that come with that and attempting to push the technology forward in both landers and payloads, such as testing in situ resource utilization concepts. Admittedly, those kinds of goals are going to be ruffling the feathers of people who have to deal with the fallout of potential failures, but it's not just people being sensitive about things. There actually are some very valid criticisms. There's a policy in the United States called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, FAR, which essentially says NASA needs to exercise due diligence on all fronts with contractors. Two months in the clips, one of the nine companies selected, orbit beyond, bowed out of the program, citing internal corporate challenges, the kicker of which was licensing intellectual property for their lander to Axiom Research Labs, a company in India, in exchange for Axiom owning a majority share in the company. That in and of itself isn't nefarious, but under NASA's clips contract requirements, companies selected must have majority ownership with a United States affiliation. There were other legit problems as well noted by the OIG report. There were some companies that just weren't financially stable. There were actually two companies within clips that were suing each other. And there was one company that went bankrupt after getting a million dollars and they only paid back about a thousand of that million that they got. But there are some things in the OIG report that you look at and you kind of go, hmm, that sounds a little bit more like old space complaining. Clips is a program designed to drive innovation, which means you're taking a big risk, which should be distributed between multiple companies. OIG took issue with that. And frankly, that misses the point. When you're trying to push the edge, things will fail. As long as people and major payloads aren't consumed in those failures, so what? The payloads aren't the point. Developing ease of access and lowering the cost is. And you don't do that with a cost plus contract and letting the coin roll in. You do that with fixed price contracts and companies that move fast and break stuff. It feels like NASA's Office of the Inspector General is just being stuffy and they don't want to move beyond the traditional aerospace ways we've done in the past and we should now continue to do in the future. And frankly, that just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Alas, NASA has accepted OIG's report and said that they are gonna implement all the changes that were requested of NASA by next summer. Let's move it a little bit because we wanna sort of bring it up and get happy again after reading the report like that. There were two launches since our last Tomorrow News episode, so we're gonna go ahead and stick around in China for our space traffic. A four-stage, all-solid propellant Long March 11 began its Ascent to Orbit at 01-23 Universal Time on September 15th. Nine small Earth observation satellites were successfully placed into a Polar Sun synchronous orbit for the Changyong Satellite Technology Company Limited, a Chinese commercial remote sensing company. All nine will be used for imaging and high-definition video of the Earth's surface. Changyong is ramping up in-house satellite production so that way they can have a constellation of 138 satellites to take daily high-resolution imagery of the Earth. Liftenau from the Jiquan Satellite Launch Center, a single-stick Long March 4B went on the uphill at 05-40 Universal Time on September 21st, delivering Haiyang-2C successfully to low Earth orbit. Haiyang-2C will monitor ocean wave height and maritime winds and carries a payload to track weather data from buoys and ships that can then be used in meteorological forecasting. And it's time for a little fire-walking as we look at this week's upcoming launches. And for this week's space weather, here's Dr. Tamatha Sco. Although it is official we are in Solar Cycle 25, the solar activity sure is taking a while to ramp up. As we switch to our front-side sun, you can see there aren't a lot of active regions on the Earth-facing disc right now. We do have a region in the Southern Hemisphere, but it's getting to fizzle out a little bit. It hasn't given us all that much. However, we do have a remnant coronal hole that's gonna be rotating into the Earth strike zone here over the next couple of days. It could give us a small burst of fast solar wind that could bring Aurora down to high latitudes, but not much else. And it doesn't look like there's a lot else going on on the front-side. However, as we switch to our far-sided sun, now this is Stereo A and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side. You can see the sun looks pretty bland, except in that eastern limb in the Northern Hemisphere, oh my goodness, look at that bright region that's beginning to rotate into Stereo's view. This is the region that we believe was shot that massive solar storm off of the sun's west limb a short while ago. And as it rotates into Stereo view, we're gonna be checking to see if it's flare active and if it's giving us any activity at all to know whether or not it might be a solar storm producer. Meanwhile, it's definitely going to boost the solar flux for amateur radio operators and emergency responders here over the next couple of days as it rotates into Earth view, but it doesn't look like it's going to give us any radio bursts and that's good news for radio comms for space traffic. And now for your Martian Minute. It's been about a month since we checked in at the Red Planet and thankfully, as we've moved past the winter solstice, the dust storm seemed to be finally calming down. As we take a look at the Martian atmosphere over the past month, using the Femus imager aboard Mars Odyssey, we see at the beginning of August, we were still getting some strong dust ups in the plains of Asperia, which is southeast of Jezero crater. And remember, Jezero crater is where we plan to land the Perseverance rover sometime next year. Then in the second week and the third week of August, we got multiple dust ups in Gale crater near Curiosity and also in the Isdus Planitia, which is just right in where Jezero crater is. So that area has been a little bit of a problem for a while. But luckily, as we started moving into September, things at least near Jezero crater have begun to die down and calm down. We are still having issues in Gale crater, which is expected because it's much closer to the equator. So it takes a little bit longer for things like dust storms to kind of die down a little bit. And hopefully as we continue moving in through September, we will see those areas calm down as well, because we definitely don't want to see a lot of dust storms anywhere near either Insight or Curiosity rover. And speaking of in Gale crater, right now Curiosity is enjoying a balmy minus three decrease Celsius. The low is a minus 69 Celsius. And at Elysium Planitia, which is just a little bit higher latitude where Insight is, Insight is seeing a high of minus 14 Celsius, a low of minus 96 Celsius. And the winds are out of the West Northwest at six meters a second. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see Aurora or how that bright region on the sun's far side might affect you, come check out my channel or see me at space weatherwoman.com. Time to get ourselves into that wheelhouse of knowledge with this week's space flight bonanza. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc on schedules for upcoming NASA missions as present workforce sizes are limited due to social distancing. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft has seen its launch slip four months due to Marshall Space Flight Center being closed for months as well. And several other similar Explorer class missions have seen their launch dates slip. One that hasn't slipped any further though, the James Webb Space Telescope. What? Yeah, that's right. It's still on track for a launch in October of next year. The International Space Station had to do some fast moves on Tuesday to avoid a piece of space debris. US Space Command and NASA predicted the object to come within 1.4 kilometers of the station, roughly one-fifth of a second apart from occupying the same location at orbital speeds. Way too close for comfort. So a Progress vehicle docked to the International Space Station fired its engines for about 150 seconds, moving to a much more comfortable distance. All three astronauts presently aboard Anatoli Ivanishin, Ivan Wagner and Chris Cassidy did board their Soyuz out of an abundance of caution. This was the third time this year the ISS has had to perform a debris avoidance maneuver, a number, which is increasing. Blue Origin is looking at potentially developing commercial space stations. NASA has recently expressed an interest not just in privately developed modules at the International Space Station, but also free-flying private space stations as destinations for NASA astronauts and experiments. A new job opening on Blue Origin's website has somewhat given this away. They're looking for an orbital habitat formulation lead. So if you've got the chops to enable Blue Origin's goal of millions of people in space, go for it. Of course, Blue Origin's notoriously secretive nature means that we know next to nothing about the plants, but it sounds like they're working to make the dreams of Gerard K. O'Neill and a litany of O'Neillian disciples, such as myself, a reality. As we wrap up this episode of Tomorrow News, I wanna thank all of you citizens who helped make all of the shows of Tomorrow possible. Even though I've been here for the better part of half a decade, I'm still stunned at the support that we get from all of you. Because of this, all of us passionate folks here at Tomorrow are able to tell the good word of space to all of the universe that we can. And frankly, it's an honor that you believe in us and our mission enough to support us as we do so. If you'd like to join the ranks of our citizens, head on over to youtube.com slash T-M-R-O slash join and check out all the levels and rewards that you get with them. At escape velocity, we've opened up early access to news scripts. So if you'd like to see all the bad jokes and spelling errors being written in real time, your time has come. And of course, subscribing to us, liking our videos, setting up notifications, commenting below and sharing our shows everywhere that you can is the easiest way to be an incredible help. Now don't forget, tomorrow we are going to be taking a deep, deep dive into that phosphine discovery in Venus' atmosphere because it may potentially be life, question mark. So we're gonna go super into that and kind of give you the rundown and all the deeps about it and why it's such an exciting thing. So I hope to see you tomorrow. It's gonna be a super, super good one. And that's Seco 10 for this episode of Tomorrow News. Thank you so much for watching and remember, stay safe, stay healthy and keep exploring.