 Hello citizens of Earth and welcome to Station 204. So glad to have you here for our space news for October 17, 2019 and we're going to go ahead and get it started by going right into space traffic and heading on down to the steps of Kazakhstan. Lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on October 9th at 10.17.56 universal time, a Russian proton rocket purchased via international launch services lofted two payloads. One being the Udilsat 5WB communication satellite and the other being Northrop Grumman's first mission extension vehicle, also known as MEV-1. Sixteen hours after liftoff, separation of both spacecraft was confirmed, both placed into a high altitude elliptical super synchronous transfer orbit. Udilsat 5WB will be replacing the old Udilsat 5WA, continuing to provide TV services to Europe. But MEV-1 though, that's a proof of concept mission and it could in a very exciting way change geostationary orbit forever. MEV-1 is headed to Rendezvous with Intel SAT 901, a communication satellite currently in a graveyard orbit. It will attach itself physically to Intel SAT 901, it will move it to a new orbit and act as a propulsion and attitude control system for five years, adding that time on to the operational life of the satellite. After which it will move Intel SAT 901 back to the graveyard orbit. Intel SAT is paying 13 million dollars a year for MEV-1 services and that will most certainly be easily remade during the operations of Intel SAT 901. If you think about it, it's kind of like going to a car dealership and getting a used car. And Northrop Grumman, they've got more MEV missions on the books. Speaking of Northrop Grumman, is that, oh my gosh, it is a rare bird. The Pegasus XL, released from its L1011 carrier jet Stargazer at 0202 Universal Time on October 11th, its solid first stage ignited and carried NASA's ionospheric connection explorer satellite to orbit successfully using three solid motor stages. ICON's launch had been delayed two years due to issues with the Pegasus XL rocket, so hats off to the perseverance of the ICON and Pegasus XL teams. Presently, there are no additional Pegasus XL launches on the books. Lifting off from New Zealand's gorgeous Machia Peninsula at 0124 Universal Time on October 16th was Rocket Lab's Electron on its As the Crow flies mission. A successful ascent saw it deploy Astro Digital's Palisade Experimental Microsatellite, and holy moly would you take a look at that view of the kick stage from the second stage. Alright, let's take a look at it again. And again. Wow. And here's this week's upcoming departures. One of the things that I love about spaceflight and space sciences is that there is always something new to talk about, and this past week is no exception. There are a ton of stories that we could talk about that could stand all on their own, but Jamie is a princess. And like a princess, she likes to rush her royal subjects of her royal court. So here's all of this week's news in a big old fast spaceflight bonanza. Boeing has announced that they'll be performing their Pat abort test of Starliner on November 4th. The final test needed before Starliner takes its first flight, which was also announced as presently being set for December 17th. The uncrewed test flight will see the Starliner capsule go up on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 in the N22 configuration, and indicating no payload fairing, two for having two solid rocket motors, and the final two for designating a twin-engine Centaur as the upper stage. Capsule's got to have a little more oomph, you know what I mean? As for a crew test flight? No idea. Boeing hasn't said anything yet. And if you'd like to know more about both Boeing's Pat abort test and SpaceX's upcoming in-flight abort and specifics as to who's doing what and why, head on over to last week's space news for October 10th. NASA approved for Boeing's Starliner to stay on station for six months during its first crew test flight due to schedule uncertainty. Also, NASA is looking at doing the same with SpaceX's Crew Dragon test flight because the last seats they have on a Soyuz will launch in March 2020. NASA and Roscosmos have agreements to fly each other's astronauts on each other's spacecraft at no cost, and NASA is most certainly not wanting to buy any more Soyuz seats, especially because last time they cost $80 million a pop. Commercial Crew has just been so busy of late as the program begins to bear the fruit of its efforts, and to make sure that taste is a little sweeter, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stopped by SpaceX's Hawthorne, California factory on October 10th. Now, he threw a decent helping of praise onto SpaceX's efforts, and he thinks this stems from a certain tweet of his before SpaceX's Starship presentation. Alas, happy space agencies make for happy space flights. Straddle Launch is the red-headed stepchild of space flight. It's been having a very tough course trying to find its feet under itself, and just when it was finally starting to walk and get that plane that everyone thought was never going to fly actually flying, the driving force behind it, Paul Allen, passed away. Straddle Launch was over, one and done, the spruce goose of our time, but not so fast. The company released a statement noting that they've transitioned ownership and are continuing regular operations. And that was it. No further questions, and no mention of who the new owner may be. But I think that there may be a few clues as to who the new owner is. In 2018, Straddle Launch bought two Pegasus XL launchers from Northrop Grumman as a part of their aircraft's test program, which by the way, they named their plane Rock. Now this week, Northrop Grumman announced that they had bought back the two Pegasus XL rockets from Straddle Launch. And of course, Rock was built by Scaled Composites, which is a division of Northrop Grumman. How about that? Now truly, no one outside of Straddle Launch actually knows who owns them now. But uh, yeah, can't stay with total confidence that I might know who the new owner is, but I mean if you take a look at some of the things that have happened in the past couple of weeks, uh, well, you know, you might be able to take a guess. Heading up to the International Space Station, an emergency spacewalk has been scheduled to repair a battery discharge unit, or BCDU. Christina Koch and Jessica Meir were already scheduled to perform a battery swap spacewalk with each other, and are trained for generic repair spacewalks like this one. This will be the first time two women perform a spacewalk together in the 54 years of extravehicular activity. And that's your spaceflight bonanza for this week, and bonanza, well, that reminds me of cowboys, and cowboys they like eating meat. So to talk a little bit about meat and space this week, here's Lisa. Some of you may not know that I actually used to be vegetarian for like two years. Then I moved to the US and well, you know, but as someone who wants to eventually end up living on Mars, I may not have to give up meat again in the future. On September 26th, the first ever space-grown meat was harvested by Oleg Skripochka on the International Space Station. Although as you can see here, it's more like a squishy ball of cow muscle rather than a medium rare steak. But that snowball shape is actually an advantage. Microgravity removes the need for support structures like is needed with tissue bioprinting here on Earth. Space meatballs can be printed from all sides and directions rather than the layer by layer style on Earth, which means the tissues mature much faster. And you've probably heard that raising livestock is bad for the environment too. One kilogram of beef can take more than 10,000 litres of water to produce. But why grow the whole animal when you can just grow the parts that you need? Speaking of the parts that you need, this technology may be used to grow human organs in the future. In July 2019, SpaceX's CRS-18 Dragon delivered the biofabrication facility to the space station. The payload developer, Techshot, plans to test a mix of organ-like tissues first before attempting to print full-scale organs in space. Now I want you to imagine for a second here, you're part of the first Mars settlement. There's less than 100 citizens and you're about to lose one of them who needs a kidney transplant. Nobody's a match, there's just too few humans on this planet. But thanks to research done this year in 2019, you don't have to worry about having a donor, you can just print a kidney instead. And that's the kind of future that I find incredibly exciting. But before this technology helps people on Mars, it may even help you or your neighbor on Earth. Remember how I mentioned that cell cultures can mature faster in space? Well, perhaps we can begin manufacturing organs in space and ship them down to Earth. They'll need a smooth ride to protect their delicate structures, so vehicles like the Soyuz, which peaks at about 6 Gs of force during re-entry, might not be ideal. Sierra Nevada Corporation's DreamChaser mini-space plane, which looks so adorably cute! Could be that smooth ride, peaking at around 2 Gs. And this is what DreamChaser looks like as of this week. And it's set to begin cargo flights to the International Space Station in late 2021 with a crew version planned as well. So I have two questions for you. Would you eat laboratory-grown meat and would you consider receiving a lab-grown organ donation? As always, let us know in the comments below. Would I eat laboratory-grown meat? Absolutely. Would I accept a laboratory-grown organ? Hell, yes, I would. Would I eat a laboratory-grown meat organ? Let's head on over for this week's Space Weather with Dr. Tamatha Sco. We are in suspense mode this week while both space weather continues to be a bit quiet. We do have a couple coronal holes that are going to be rotating in through the Earth Strike Zone here over the next two weeks and they could bring us a bit of Aurora. As we switch to our front-side sun, you can see we do have a spotless disc. There are no bright regions on the front side, which means amateur radio operators and emergency responders, you are still dealing with poor radio propagation on Earth's day side and that is going to continue for quite some time. But you do see a finger-like coronal hole that is coming up from the southern region. That is going to be rotating into the Earth Strike Zone here around the weekend and that's going to be storm number one. And it could bring us some Aurora II mid-latitudes, but it won't last all that long. We kind of have to look at it as a warm-up to the bigger coronal hole that's coming. It's going to be rotating into EarthView here over the next couple days. And as we switch to our far-side sun, this is the view from stereo. You're kind of viewing it from the side. You can definitely see that big dark coronal hole in the middle of the disc. That one is the one that's going to be rotating into EarthView and in about 10 days to two weeks, it could be bringing us a much bigger solar storm. This one has actually brought us to G2 levels just about a month or two ago and we got some decent Aurora over many parts of the world. So this is the one that Aurora photographers are definitely waiting for. For more details on this week's space weather, including some gorgeous Aurora photos from the last time that these crotal holes rotated in through the Earth Strike Zone, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Alexi Leonov was the first human to step outside of their spacecraft. Now, he did this in 1965. Quite an accomplishment for any astronaut and for most of them, that probably would have been essentially the highlight of their career. But see, Alexi was not your typical astronaut. He ended up going on to Command Soyuz 19, the Soviet portion of the Apollo Soyuz test project. And he also commanded the respect of both astronaut cores in the United States and the Soviet Union and also the art world as well. Warned in 1934, Alexi's father was arrested during Stalin's purges but was eventually released. During the time his father was away, Alexi took up art as a way to help the family afford food. He applied to the Academy of Arts in Riga Latvia but skipped out due to its high costs. Instead, he joined Air Force Pilot School but kept his art roots alive by going to the Academy of Arts part time. Selected to be a part of the first cosmonaut training group, he was assigned to Vashkhod 2. His task would be to perform the first spacewalk and he stepped outside of the capsule, spending 12 minutes attached to a 5 meter umbilical. Now during the spacewalk, his space suit expanded in size and ended up becoming so large that he couldn't get himself to fit back in through the airlock. So he had to take a valve and start bleeding the air out of his space suit. He eventually did make it back into the Vashkhod capsule but he was on the verge of having the bends and nitrogen narcosis not as fun as it sounds. Ever the artist, he drew the first piece of art in space, his view of sunrise over the limb of earth on the Vashkhod 2 mission. With both the United States and the Soviet Union focused on landing an astronaut on the moon, the Soviets chose Leonov to be their first moonwalker but the program was cancelled. He was then selected to command Soyuz 11, the first flight to Salyut 1, the first space station. A fellow crew member was suspected to have had tuberculosis, so the prime crew was pulled and the backups flew. The backup crew died during re-entry when a valve opened and depressurized the atmosphere inside of the capsule. Considered to command several more Salyut expeditions, he was then moved onto the Apollo-Soyuz test project and commanded the Soviet portion, Soyuz 19. Upon docking with the Apollo capsule, both crews toured each other's craft, shared gifts, food, and conversed in each other's language. Leonov said that his lifelong friend, the American commander of the Apollo-Soyuz test project, Thomas Stafford, ended up contributing to the third language spoken on that mission, which was English, Russian, and Oklehomsky. Leonov also drew portraits of the astronauts while they were docked together, and if you ask me, that's a pretty good cowboy hat there. After Soyuz 19, Leonov became Chief Cosmonaut and Director of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, retiring from space activities in 1992. He then went into banking, but he still continued his art. And I feel that Leonov is an incredible role model. His legacy shows that space exploration, well, it could bring together two opposing nations for a common goal. Thanks for watching this week's Space News, and of course you're going to want to tune in this Saturday at 1800 universal time for tomorrow's space. And our live interview this week is going to be with Robin Hague, the lead engineer of Skyora. Now, if you're a big fan of space flight history, you're aware of the British Skylark and Black Arrow programs in Skyora. Well, they're giving those two programs kind of a revival to bring small satellite launch capabilities to the United Kingdom. And it's a non cryogenic launch vehicle. So this is definitely going to be an interesting discussion for sure. And of course a huge thank you to all of our citizens of tomorrow. Without you folks, we would not be able to do space news. We wouldn't be able to do our live show. We wouldn't be able to follow our mission, which is to get people excited about space. 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So I'm sure hoping that if I ever do that, you all buy me a couple of drinks as well. You definitely don't want to miss this. So make sure you've got all your ducks in a row to know when we're going to be on. So that's it for this week's space news and until the next one, keep exploring. Drop this off. Let me tell you, the studio is spooky at night.