 Hello and welcome to Station 204. So glad to have you aboard here for this week's edition of Tomorrow Space News, where we're going to be talking to you about two very big contracts that NASA is pursuing that could change space flight forever. In addition, we've got our weekly SpaceX update from Ryan, coverage of this past week's launches, and we'll be leading off with the continued anomalies of Boeing's Starliner Teth flight. But I do want to remind you to subscribe to us here tomorrow, also make sure to like our video if you do like it, and set up notifications if you'd like to see when we're going to be doing more videos. You can set up to have all the videos or some of them, so pick your level that you'd like to be at. So I said that we're going to talk about the continued anomalies of Starliner, so why delay it any further? Let's just jump right into it. We've all been wondering just exactly what went wrong during Starliner's orbital flight test one back in December. We knew the onboard clocks weren't in sync, but the nature of the problem wasn't known, as investigations in aerospace take their time. It's worth getting those assessments right the first time, especially if you're going to discuss some early findings while the investigation is still happening. But the independent review board running this investigation of the OFT-1 flight announced this week that there were actually additional anomalies, and one of them could have been catastrophic, and all of these anomalies should have been caught on the ground before the flight even happened. The onboard clocks being out of sync were magnified by a sudden dropout in Starliner's communication systems. Now, Boeing has said it's likely background noise that's caused that, but the most startling of the mistakes was only just revealed. The software for controlling the thrusters on Starliner's service module was set for the wrong phase of flight. That means that when Starliner jettisoned its service module, the thrusters wouldn't have worked correctly, and it could have potentially re-impacted with the Starliner capsule just before re-entry. That could have ended up breaching the hull or damaging the heat shield, which is very bad if you're about to go through atmospheric re-entry. Now, that could have led to something called an LOVC-level event that's loss of vehicle and crew, and that is very, very, very bad. This was only discovered during reviews of critical software sequences, which was undertaken because of the clock anomaly beforehand, and these critical software sequences were reviewed during the mission. Now, the comms dropout and interference issue, that's why you do test flights. There's always unforeseen issues with hardware that may occur. Same with software. It's to be expected that some problems would crop up, but at this level, software threatening the safety of both vehicle and crew, that's just downright unacceptable. It just absolutely boggles my mind that Boeing got $2 billion of more funding than SpaceX. And here we are with a spacecraft that clearly should not have been flown, even for a test flight. In my opinion, Boeing has shown themselves deficient in an ability to find and mitigate any problems that may occur on the ground before flight. As far as I'm concerned, NASA should have Boeing refly the orbital flight test at their own cost, which is something on the order of $410 million that Boeing would have to eat. That is perfectly acceptable, as far as I'm concerned, because when lives are on the line, safety and especially understanding what you need to do to make your spacecraft safe is paramount. Now, to get on with a little bit more testing, we're going to head on over to Ryan who's going to give us our SpaceX update. It's been an extremely exciting week for small sat manufacturers. The SpaceX have released their online reservation form for their small sat rideshare program. SpaceX tweeted when the web page was launched and comparing it to Rocket Lab's online booking form, it doesn't look as cool in my opinion. However, it is extremely easy to use, which will enable even more organizations to launch their own satellites by themselves. It's also just a fun thing to play around with, to see the different prices for the different orbits, even if personally, you aren't interested in spending 1.5 million dollars to launch a small sat into space. Now, from what I can see at the moment, heading into the future, SpaceX are going to be doing rideshare small sat missions and not dedicated ones, as it will cost quite a lot more for a dedicated small sat to be launched on one of the most powerful rockets in the world. So for the time being, launch providers like Rocket Lab and hopefully in the future version orbit should still be able to have a unique consumer market for dedicated payloads. Starship progress has also been continuing this past week, with a bulkhead being prepared to be mated with a barrel section for the Starship SN1 vehicle, which will hopefully perform a high altitude and high velocity test before the end of June this year. But as we all know, aerospace development is somewhat unpredictable at times, looking at it from the outside. So the best thing we can all do at the moment is to get excited and wait for the first flight of the big silver ship. And finally for this week, Reddit user Martian256 was on the flight to Florida two weeks ago and using their phone, they managed to capture this. Yep, this is the SpaceX in-flight abort test as seen from a plane and how epic this looks is just incredible. I mean, just look at the fireball. And after that video, I'm so excited to see what the future holds for SpaceX. And before I literally explode of excitement and break the number one rule of tomorrow, which is don't die, I think it would be best if I handed you back over to Jared. Thanks, Ryan. And now to talk about things blowing up in a little bit of a more controlled manner, let's go ahead and take a look at this past week's launches. Starting off with the ISS departure, Soyuz MS-13 undocked at 04.50 universal time on February 6th, carrying Russian commander Alexander Skortsov, ISA astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA astronaut Christina Koch. At 07.18, the reentry burn was initiated and after atmospheric entry, Soyuz MS-13 landed at 08.12 universal. On this flight, Koch set the record for a single spaceflight duration for a woman 328 days, which also included being a part of the first all-woman spacewalk. And now a classic Soyuz 2-1B, leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 21.42 universal time on February 6th, conducted on behalf of Arian space for customer OneWeb, 34 satellites were carried into polar orbit and successfully deployed over four hours. OneWeb intends to launch 10 more times this year, continuing to build out their satellite internet constellation, no word yet from astronomers as to how bad it is. Bouncing over to Japan's Nagashima Space Center, an H2A rocket lofted information-gathering satellite Optical 7 at 01.34 universal time on Sunday, February 9th. IGS Optical 7 is a spy satellite for Japan's government and it was successfully placed into orbit. Information about the satellite, as you probably guessed right, yep, being kept secret by the Japanese government. Lifting off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V in the Rare 411 configuration, meaning a four-meter payload bearing, one solid rocket booster, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage, lofted a joint-study science spacecraft for NASA and the European Space Agency called Solar Orbiter. Launch occurred at 0403 universal time on February 10th. About 50 minutes after launch, a second engine burn of the Centaur upper stage took the vehicle into a heliocentric orbit, successfully placing Solar Orbiter on track to begin its mission to study the sun up close and personal. And here are your upcoming departures. Now NASA's well-known for their own missions, both robotic and crude. One of the things that we really don't discuss about NASA, though, is their role as a progenitor in technological development. You see, with a lot of the technology in spaceflight these days, you can kind of look back at NASA and figure it out. Even companies like SpaceX owe a lot of their existence to the work that NASA has done. And that work is about to expand because NASA is getting ready to fund two ideas that they feel are going to be critical to the future of spaceflight. Right now, the International Space Station is set to operate till 2028, but at the end of its life, something's got to happen. Plans right now are to perform a controlled deorbit of the station, sending it into the drink in the South Pacific. But I sure am hoping that that's not what happens. I mean, I'd love to see NASA hand over the station to a commercial entity and allow them to run the operations of it. And if you think that idea sounds a little far-fetched, there's actually a precedent for it. It's been done before. Yes, really. It's happened already. In 1999, a private venture known as Mircorp collaborated with Roscosmos to use Mir for commercial purposes. They actually flew a 73-day mission in 2000 with two cosmonauts on Soyuz TMA-30, privately funded the launch of a cargo resupply progress vehicle, and secured deals to make Mir a commercial alternative to the upcoming International Space Station, including flying up civilian visitors. Now, as you can imagine, this made a great number of people at NASA and in the U.S. government upset, and it ended with NASA getting what it wanted, Roscosmos performing a controlled deorbit of Mir in 2001. But since that time, happily, NASA's negative and harsh attitudes towards commercial enterprise and space that has pretty much completely melted away. So much so that last year, they solicited proposals from commercial companies for a public-private partnership for use of a port on Node 2, the International Space Station's Harmony module. Now, using the commercial crew program as a blueprint, a fixed-firm contract would be given to a company, and Axiom Space has been selected by NASA to use Node 2. Axiom's idea built a private habitation module, one that could eventually be used with multiple Axiom modules to replace the ISS entirely, although Axiom is also presently noting that they'd like to deliver multiple new modules to the ISS itself, not just a single module. Yes, it's not the full-blown hope that I have of NASA handing over the entire United States orbital segment to a commercial partner, but hey, it's a start, and it's a good way to light a fire under the industry to make it happen. Now, if that does happen, that should free up NASA to start looking at sending humans to deep space. And if you are going to do that, you might want to end up building your deep space crewed vehicles in orbit around the Earth. Now, nobody has really tried to manufacture anything on orbit, like a vehicle, until now. NASA's Restore-L mission is already pretty groundbreaking. In 2022, it'll rendezvous with the Landsat 7 satellite and perform the first attempt to refuel a live satellite. But here comes NASA, cranking it up to 11, awarding a contract to Maxar Technologies to put a small robotic arm on the Restore-L spacecraft. It's got a great acronym, SPIDER, or Space Infrastructure Dexterous Project, and it will demonstrate on orbit assembly and manufacturing. It'll put together seven prefabricated panels to make a three-meter-sized comm antenna for KA-band use. But more impressively, it'll be attempting to make a 10-meter-long structural beam out of lightweight composites. Making spacecraft-grade composites on the surface of the Earth is nothing to sneeze at, so doing it on orbit is the next great leap in bringing costs down for just about every kind of mission you can think of. Space stations, crewed flights to deep space, tethers, massive space telescopes, you name it, on orbit manufacturing can enable it. Much like the do-or-die attempt at reusability SpaceX announced in 2011, to me, this is the kind of bleeding-edge technological boundary pushing that is the next big thing, and really enabling that future in space that we all want. Wrapping up this week's tomorrow Space News, I once again just want to thank everybody who contributes to this show. We really can't do this without you, and each and every one of you who does so, you're amazing and is greatly appreciated. If you'd like to contribute to the shows of tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join. And watching our shows, liking, subscribing, setting up notifications, and sharing us everywhere you can is an incredible help as well. And that wraps up this week's Space News. Thank you all of you for watching through our show. And of course, don't forget, keep exploring.