 Hello citizens of Earth and welcome aboard station 204 for this week's edition of Tomorrow News. Ryan is going to be giving us some parts of a SpaceX update. We're talking a little bit about a test that's going to go boom. And Dr. Tamethuskov has our space weather and a standard operating bonanza to wrap it all up. Now, before we officially get started, just want to remind you, if you like what we do here tomorrow, don't forget to subscribe to us, like our videos, set up notifications and share us everywhere that you can. So let's go ahead and get this tomorrow news started for the week of September 13th, 2020. And Ryan, light it on up. The news in the world of SpaceX is slightly quieter this week. However, we have gotten the date of the next launch of SpaceX's current most powerful rocket as the Falcon Heavy will be launching USSF 44 on February the 28th next year. SpaceX have released this video of the full launching and landing sequence for Falcon 9 taken from the SEACOM 1B mission. I find it so fascinating to see this perspective from the Falcon during launching and its landing because it's unlike any other rocket currently being launched from the Cape, especially when you can see the grid fins splitting up the clouds during reentry. The booster B1060 has also been spotted being taken off the drone ship and placed onto the road transporter with the massive crane that they have down in Port Canaveral. Heading a bit west this time into Texas, some error covers for Starship have been spotted laying around Boca Chica. Most likely these are going to be fitted to the next operational prototype as Starship SN7.1 has been rolled out to do some more tank testing. And to wrap it all up this week, some parts of SN11 have also been spotted specifically in the aft dome section meaning that the team down in Boca Chica are working on SN7.1, SN8, SN9, SN10, and SN11 all at the same time. And they are still increasing production speeds. Amazing. Wow, just absolutely cooking those launch vehicles down in Texas. Thanks for that update, Ryan. Northrop Grumman is doing the exact opposite of that though. Unfortunately, they have officially canceled their Omega launch vehicle. Omega have been designed for one reason and one reason only. Win the national security space launch phase two contract which was awarded last month to United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur and SpaceX's Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy combo. Northrop Grumman has indicated that they will not protest the contracts awarded but last week Northrop Grumman did win a $13.3 billion contract to develop the United States Next Generation ICBM so I think that they're not hurting too badly. Unless we forget, they are also still supplying the Gem 63 which will replace aerojet Rocketdyne solids on the Atlas V and Gem 63 XL boosters that United Launch Alliance will use on their Vulcan Centaur. Speaking of the Gem 63 boosters for the Atlas V, they are preparing for their first flight on the NROL-101 mission which should occur before the end of this year. Assembly of the Atlas V rocket that NROL-101 will ride on has started. It'll fly in the 531 configuration meaning a five meter sized payload fairing, three solid strap-on boosters and a single engine Centaur upper stage. It's those three solid strap-on boosters where a large majority of the attention is, as mentioned, they're the new Gem 63s from Northrop Grumman. Up until this mission, if you flew an Atlas V with any number of solids, they were the aerojet Rocketdyne AJ60A. Compared to the AJ60As, the Gem 63 motors are a little heavier and make a little less thrust. So why the change if the Gem 63s aren't improving the performance? I mean, you're changing a major component of your launch vehicle. That's a pretty gutsy move. The biggest overall factor was, of course, one that everybody in the space industry is thinking about. Costs, a Gem 63 costs 40% less than an AJ60A, but there was something that also influenced it that you may not have heard about. United Launch Alliance aren't the only folks who care about costs. Aerojet Rocketdyne does as well. Now, in 2016, ULA was looking for a new booster and at that time, Aerojet Rocketdyne was moving their corporate headquarters out of their location near Sacramento in California. In addition, the engineering and manufacturing centers were going to be moved as well and this included where the AJ60A Solid Rocketbooster is processed and manufactured. In order to provide ULA with the solid motors that they needed, the factory would have to be completely moved and rebuilt elsewhere or the factory would stay where it is but ULA would be the only customer and both of these situations were incredibly expensive options. At that time, Orbital ATK saw the opportunity, swooped in and scored the contract. Orbital ATK is now a part of Northrop Grumman and if you take a look at what it took to make the Gem63s a reality, literally signing a contract and then performing its first flight within four years, that is stupid fast. That is the blink of an eye in the aerospace industry and looking forward is something that aerospace companies do in order to make sure that they have a product that their customers are going to want and United Launch Alliance is already doing that even though Vulcan Centaur hasn't flown yet. The Twitter sphere went a little nuts in July when Tori Bruno tweeted a photo that was primarily focused on a special pair of flip flops ULA made to celebrate the launch of the Perseverance Rover and it wasn't the high fashion that is flip flops that caught everyone's eyes. No, it's that model sitting right next to them, Vulcan in triple barrel form. Now Tori downplayed it immediately in the tweet saying just the model related to a routine ongoing trade study, nothing more. Sure, sure it was, you tease. Guess what? Yup, ULA admitted this week that they're looking at Vulcan Heavy but as something that's a possibility in the long-term future. The US Space Force has been very frank about their attitude towards super heavy class launch vehicles and that can best be described as we can wait. Just for some context, a Vulcan Centaur with six solid fuel strap-on motors can lift nearly the same amount as a Delta IV Heavy. We also learned that unfortunately a very interesting project ULA had been researching appears to be dead. A new upper stage for Vulcan had been proposed called the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, ASIS. It had a system in it called Integrated Vehicle Fluids which would have allowed the stage's cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to remain cryo'd for long periods of time. This meant that ASIS could have stayed on orbit for days, even up to weeks and act as a space tug or maybe give a trip to a different orbit for a different payload that it met up with. But, alas, ULA is not moving forward with it but they did say that some systems and lessons learned will be integrated into the Centaur V upper stage that Vulcan will fly. So, guess we'll have to wait and see. Smallsat launcher companies are a dime a dozen. It seems a lot like the late odds in the early 2010s when everyone, even your grandmother, had a new space startup. Now, some companies like Rocket Lab have gone on to success. They are certainly a flight proven aerospace company. There are also some like Relativity or Firefly Aerospace which are up and coming. But then there is Astra which seem to come out of nowhere and they just performed their first test flight. You may remember Astra from earlier this year when they tried to win the DARPA launch challenge on the final day of competition. They got their vehicle, Rocket 3.0, to the pad. All was set and then just seconds away from liftoff. Hold, hold, hold. And we have a hold call. And that ended that. The same launch vehicle was set to make another launch attempt a few weeks after just on its own, not for any prizes or anything but a valve failure during a wet dress rehearsal destroyed Rocket 3.0. So, Astra did what you do after blowing up your own rocket. They made another one. But this one had some changes so it had a little less chance of blowing up. Rocket 3.1 was the update and a multitude of launch attempts from the Pacific Space Port Complex Alaska on Kodiak Island tried to happen and all of them either met with technical issues whether violations or range violations. But finally the day came and on September 12th at 0319 universal time Rocket 3.1 left the pad. Unfortunately during the burn of the first stage an oscillation caused it to deviate from its trajectory and the flight safety system commanded a shutdown of the first stage engines. It fell back where it landed in spectacular fashion. Whoa. As the wise Dutta has said if you are not breaking stuff you are not testing enough. Dutta is good. Dutta is wise. Astra noted that the first three flights of Rocket 3.x are not expected to actually make it to orbit. They're just looking to get good data. So this un-normal flight was not unexpected and they did end up getting good data. So we are looking forward to the changes that they make when they go and try to fly Rocket 3.2. So best of luck to all of you out at Astra. Now we did have a rocket launch happen this week so let's go ahead and jump into space traffic as we head on over to China. The first of our two Chinese launches occurred on September 7th at O5-57 Universal Time. Seen a Long March 4B lifting off from the Tyon Satellite Launch Center hauling Galfen-1102 successfully into a polar orbit. The second satellite in the Galfen-11 series will increase efficiency of the system's data gathering capabilities and enhance the mission of land surveys, urban planning, crop yield estimates and disaster mitigation and prevention. The Galfen-11 series satellites are reported to have an optical resolution better than one meter. Some rather wild footage of the first stage booster crashing back on land appeared on Chinese social media sites. A majority of China's launch sites are inland so that means that the first stage boosters regularly crash to the ground and they often do so near villages and towns. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, watch out where the boosters go and don't you breathe the orange smoke. We now move over to the Zhiquan Satellite Launch Center. We're on September 12th at O5-02 Universal Time, a Kaidiao-1A left the pad and began its ascent to carry Zhilin-1 Galfen-02C optical earth observation satellite to orbit. However, at some point during the flight, the vehicle failed and it and the payload were destroyed. Official word from China is as usual quiet but this was the first failure of a Kaidiao-1A rocket and overall the fourth failure for China's rocket arsenal this year. Let's do some fire walking as we look at this week's upcoming launches. And for this week's space weather, here's Dr. Tamethasco. Space weather this week continues to be a bit on the quiet side at least as far as earth view is concerned but actually we've had quite a few solar storm launches but you have to look to find them. As we switch to our front side, son, you can see a region in the south. Now back on the fifth, this region fired a little mini solar storm and it launched a solar storm to the east of us so it didn't go earth directed but it was still a pretty view. And then not even a day later, we don't see it on earth view but if we look in coronagraphs, we had a massive solar storm launch, probably the biggest we've seen yet. And I'll bet you this was that filament that we were watching rotate across the earth facing disc just last week. Well, it looks like it might have let go but it was on the sun's far side so we didn't get a view but we do see it in coronagraphs and it's just stunning. So we will know in about two weeks when that region rotates back into view it earth whether or not that filament did erupt. Meanwhile, we have yet another region that's kind of beginning to come out in the south. This is a different one than we saw before and it's just beginning to emerge. It's still pretty quiet but it could be boosting the solar flux for amateur radio operators and emergency responders and could keep us in the marginal range for radio propagation over the next couple of days. And as you take a look at stereo's view you can see that region down in the south going pop, pop, pop. That was that weak region that fired off that earth directed solar storm that went east of earth since then it kind of fizzled out and then you started seeing yet another region grow in a finger like chrono hole in the south. Now that region is growing rapidly but we'll see whether or not it boosts that solar flux very much or whether it becomes flare active. We're not expecting all that much from it right now. For more details on this week's space weather including when and where you might see aurora and how that bright region might affect amateur radio propagation. Come check out my channel or see me at space weatherwoman.com. You know what time it is so say it to yourself because it is time for a space flight. China's reusable experimental spacecraft performed a successful flight and no images or details have been provided outside of it launched, spent two days in space and then landed. It's not just the vehicle itself that's a mystery though. Two orbits before atmospheric reentry the spacecraft deployed an object. Now previous crewed missions from China have released Banjing smallsats that monitor the spacecraft that they were deployed from but China is not saying anything and there's really not much you can discern from tracking on the ground. Officials from China's main space flight contractor the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology have discussed this experimental vehicle in the past noting that it can be reused for up to 20 flights and at one fifth the cost of the current systems. So this is a really big mystery on all fronts here and it sounds like this is gonna be a fun one to take a crack at trying to solve. NASA's Juno mission at Jupiter is looking for a mission extension. In July 2016 after breaking into orbit around the largest planet in our solar system a problem with a valve prevented Juno from firing its engine to enter a lower orbit keeping it stuck in its present 53 day elliptical orbit. But it was truly a blessing in disguise as this longer orbit has allowed Juno to accomplish its mission goals and to minimize its time being fried in the powerful belts of radiation that surround Jupiter. Currently planned to end in July of next year the team is asking for an extension to September of 2025. Juno's orbit is shifting causing its closest point to Jupiter called Parajove to move further north. This will allow Juno the opportunity to perform flybys of Jupiter's moons Io, Europa and Ganymede something that was not a part of the original mission plan. These flybys would provide a bonus wealth of data especially for NASA's upcoming Europa Clipper mission and ESA's Jupiter IC Moons Explorer mission. One flyby for Europa in late 2022 would bring the spacecraft a mere 320 kilometers above its surface. This would help gather data to estimate the thickness of Europa's outer ice layer and hunt for locations of plumes of icy material spewing up from Europa's cragged surface which would help Europa Clipper's team know where to focus their own data gathering efforts. To me this is an absolute no brainer throw Juno all of the money. The bonus science of the Io, Europa and Ganymede flybys alone is worth it. Plus Juno has revealed an incredible spread of answers to questions we didn't even know existed before it arrived in orbit. So give it money, all of the money, budget it, tomorrow firmly stands Juno. As we wrap up tomorrow news for this week I of course want to thank all of you who helped contribute to make the shows of tomorrow possible. One of my favorite things to do in tomorrow news is to thank all of you who support us. Each and every one of us at tomorrow is incredibly passionate about space flight and spreading knowledge of it to as many folks as we can. Space flight brings out the best in humanity which is something that presently feels like it is in short supply. By contributing you help us tell the stories that are the best of the best doing their best and we're honored that you give us the opportunity to do so. If you're interested in contributing to the shows of tomorrow head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join and check out the four levels that you can join at and all those rewards that you can get as well. Don't forget we also have a Discord server and the easiest way that you can help us is to subscribe, like our videos, hit that notification bell with whatever frequency you desire and share our videos everywhere that you can. Every little bit helps and is appreciated. And that's Seco 11 for this week's tomorrow news. Thank you so much for watching us and of course until the next one, remember, stay safe, stay healthy and keep exploring. Just on a special pair of flip-flops that ULA had made to celebrate the launch of the Perseverance Roser. Roser? Oh, well that's what happens when you come from a long lineage of rocket florists. The Twitter sphere went a little nuts in July. Still thinking about Perseverance Roser. This is a good one, this is a good one. Completely expected. They did get good data though, so we are very much looking forward to what they learn and helping that hopefully. That was a bunch of words that were just coming out. Ow. Dada is good. Dada is wise.