 Hello citizens of Earth, welcome back to Tomorrow News and before I get into this week's headlines, I'm going to quickly announce that the long-awaited reboot of the Tomorrow Space Live show is returning this Friday, October 29th at 1700 Pacific or 0100 UTC on the 30th. The link to the broadcast is going to be put in the description and a card should be popping up in the top right corner of your screen now. So before you watch this episode of the news, head over there and turn on notifications so you don't miss when the show starts. Right then, let's get into some space news. Starship S20 has just fired its Raptors South Korea, has just flown its first rocket designed on home soil, a Chinese satellite has been revived, the space launch system has finally been fully stacked. Jared is going to be covering a snag with Lucy's mission and all that and more is coming up on this episode of Tomorrow News, which is for the week of October 24th, 2021. I'm starting off this week with what was arguably the largest story of the week and that is the firing of a vacuum raptor engine strapped to the bottom of Starship 20. Now even though we didn't get audio from this video from SpaceX, it is very easy to imagine the roar that was coming from the pad. I'd also recommend to SpaceX to test out their engines at dusk more often as the orange glow goes very well with the dark blue sky behind it. This wasn't the only firing that day however as another static fire took place testing out both the engines installed, the aforementioned Raptor vacuum but also the sea level Raptor. Something else to look out for is the thermal protection system as from this angle you can see that once the engines had stopped firing a few white patches could be spotted on the underside of the vehicle. Another big development is the installation of Mechazilla onto the side of the orbital launch tower and it can now hold itself up. Any cables you can see attached to the crane are slack and are only there for backup. It's going to be a little while before we see it move by itself for the first time but this is a big step into seeing this crazy contraption work. A new wide bay is now under construction with the frame of the structure starting to come together. Following the static fire of S20 Eagle Musk believes we could be seeing the orbital flight test as soon as next month but the last line here could be the blockade with that schedule. The final piece of news with the SpaceX update is that NASA has started the process to acquire more commercial crew missions to the International Space Station. There are only currently six flights on the contract with five officially given the go ahead including the flights already flown crew one and crew two. Hello citizens of earth, Jared here coming to you as a disembodied voice due to my current transport being en route to station 204 for this week's tomorrow's space live show on Friday but never fear even with just a voice there's still a lot to talk about. Blue Origin has finally stopped with the salt and started actually moving forward with some plans its most recent offering is Orbital Reef a commercial space station capable of supporting up to 10 astronauts with roughly 830 cubic meters of interior space available for comparison the International Space Station has 915 cubic meters of space several partners are included such as Sierra Space Boeing and Arizona State University with Blue Origin saying Orbital Reef should be up and running in the late 2020s if pulled off it'd be a critical foothold for Blue's ambitions to be a powerhouse in the economic development of space and I'm happy to see something like this from Blue so props to them and I hope to see more of these kinds of Gerard K. O'Neill ideas not just from them but from other companies as well however Blue isn't the only game in the growing town of commercial space stations Lockheed Martin and Nano Racks had announced before Blue Origin that they're jumping into the low earth orbit game with Starlab their own commercial space station that will also launch in the late 2020s featuring a robotic arm and containing an interior volume of 340 cubic meters able to support four crew aboard and for those of you keeping score the first welds for the first Axiom space module for their own private station are now underway to be launched in 2024 always nice to see less PowerPoint and animations and more bending of metal and actual hardware however not all that bends is doing well or in this case latches is doing well NASA's Lucy mission which will perform several flybys of Trojan asteroids to help us understand the early evolution of the solar system is having a problem with one of its solar arrays a successful launch occurred on October 16th which Ryan is going to cover in just a bit but the deployment of one of its solar arrays appears to have had a snag or in this case a difficulty locking it appears one of the arrays has not latched itself fully open now the solar arrays that power Lucy are direct descendants of those used on Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo vehicle so they do have heritage and in fact that heritage goes all the way back to a study in 1993 those circular solar arrays on the Cygnus are 3.7 meters in diameter but because Lucy will be just slightly beyond the orbit of Jupiter the arrays it has are much larger 7.3 meters in diameter which actually makes them the largest circular solar arrays ever flown in space and Lucy will become the deepest solar powered probe to head out into our solar system after unfolding a system would latch those arrays flat but it appears that latched and activate Lucy's engineers are looking over possible solutions including activating the array deployment motors again to see if they can just push it into place as expected even with the issue NASA has noted that the power output from the solar arrays is still above 90% so even if latching can't be accomplished careful attention to the spacecraft and maneuvers to change its attitude can likely handle this issue just fine. Other issues present in the space world would include Boeing's troubled Starliner capsule all prepared for orbital flight test 2 back in August the latest problem is becoming a bit more clear to them damage related to contamination via humidity on 13 of the 19 valves used in Starliner service module water slipped past the valves allowing the nitrogen tetroxide propellant to interact with the Teflon on those valves and create nitric acid corroding them work is currently underway to simulate those conditions to see what the root problem is but this delays Starliner's second official flight towards the end of the first half of 2022 and its first crewed flight well that test flight is going to be even further beyond. The James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at the Guiana Space Center in South America where it will ride an arian space arian 5 to orbit at a currently scheduled date and time of December 18th 12 10 universal time with 10 billion dollars and two decades of work at stake a major systems test is well underway closeouts will begin fueling of the telescopes spacecraft bus will occur in a few weeks it'll be placed atop the arian 5 and then come December 18th many of us myself included will begin to hold our breath and not just for the launch mind you will also be holding our breath for nearly a month as j-dub unfolds itself and reaches its position in space in what I can only describe as 29 days of origami terror one of the things that j-dub will take a gander at during its first round of observations is the outer planets jupiter is one of those and it's on j-dub's target list and an interesting development should give it some data to gather one of the best known planetary atmospheric features besides arguments by dorks over where space begins in earth's atmosphere is jupiter's great red spot it's a massive anti-cyclone currently the size of the earth we think observations dating back to 1665 describe it but we really aren't entirely sure so many folks mark the official discovery to be repeated observations of it that began in 1831 with a maximum extent of being nearly triple the size of the earth it's lost a lot of that dimension in the last two decades now down to just a bit larger than a single earth diameter weather reports are delivered by frequent observations with the Hubble space telescope and the past decade of data is showing that the wind speeds within the great red spot are picking up now zipping along at 640 kilometers an hour as to what's driving the increase in wind speeds well there's currently no hypothesis that sticks well and this lack of a concrete hypothesis also extends to the formation of the great red spot itself but maybe dual observation by the Hubble space telescope and j-dub will help us figure out this mystery or more likely probably provide more questions than answers ryan let me hand it back over to you for the first time ever the country of south korea has launched a rocket designed and built domestically the ksl v2 also known as neary lifting off an hour later than announced at 0800 utc on october 21st the ground support equipment did its job the first stage did its job the second stage did its job but in the final phase of the burn the third stage sadly failed with just 46 seconds to go because of this when the 1500 kilogram dummy payload was released the vehicle wasn't going at a high enough velocity to reach orbit with the dummy payload expected to re-enter the earth's atmosphere just south of australia a quote from the president of south korea moonshain read the flight of neary was completed i'm very proud of this if we fix shortcomings discovered today we will be able to make a second launch slated for may next year a success you may recall that on september 27th china launched the chi-an 10 satellite atop along march 3b and due to an anomaly during the launch the spacecraft was lost but it has managed to raise its orbit this has led a lot of people to speculate with the most popular theory at the moment being that the satellite has a smaller backup propulsion system which is taking the place of the main engine to circularize the current 567 by 40428 kilometer orbit now although the orbit is raising the health and operational status of the satellite is still unknown a couple weeks ago i covered the potential delays that are very likely to happen around the launch of artemus one the first mission of the space launch system and while the launch is delayed the rocket has been fully stacked with an Orion capsule inside natas vehicle assembly building in cape canaveral the same building that brought us every sat and five and every space shuttle and with this week's news wrapped up let's have a look at some space traffic launching at 1623 coordinated universal time on october the 15th the shenzhou 13 mission took off from la4 sls one and the zhiguang satellite launch center in china with commander zai zi gang and operators wang lia ping and ye gong fu all aboard the three person spacecraft docking to the taiyang core module of the taiyang gong 3 space station at 2256 utc the same day the crew have some complex tasks ahead of them for their mission which is planned to end in april of 2022 these include but are certainly not limited to using the station's robotic arm to dock the new wen tian and meng tian experiment modules when they arrive performing two or three evas space medicine and physics experiments and verification that the station's life support systems are working properly on october 17th at 01 14 utc oleg novitsky yulia perisild and klim schopenko undocked from the russian nioca module of the international space station ending the period of filming for schopenko's new movie called the challenge landing in kazakhstan a few hours later at 04 36 all three people on board and now safely back on earth ending the vitsky's 191 day flight and perisild and schopenko's 12 day flight october 16th at 09 34 utc saw the launch of lucy atop this atlas five in the 401 configuration meaning it has a four meter fairing no solid rocket registers and one engine on the center upper stage launching out of slick 41 at the cape canaveral spaceful station in florida you heard everything about the mission earlier from jarrod so i won't repeat what he said progress ms 17 has been relocated on the international space station leaving the poisk module at 23 41 utc on october 21st and redocking to the nioca module at 04 21 utc the following day taking off from the shi chan satellite launch center in china at 01 27 utc on the 24th of october the shi ji an 21 pego has reportedly been placed into a healthy orbit launching at 02 10 utc on october 24th from arian launch complex three at the gyan a space center in french giana this arian five carried both sES 17 and syracuse 4a to a geostationary transfer orbit marking the second flight of this rocket type this year and arian's 10th of the year coming up over the next seven days we have the launch of aqua z1a rocket a h2a rocket progress ms 18 on a Soyuz a launch from astra launch number two of stylic group two from vandenberg and the launch of crew three to the iss and here is your space weather with dr temperscope after that g2 level solar storm that we had about a week ago that brought gorgeous aurora views cleared down to places like nebraska iowa and oregon things have gotten a bit quiet in space weather as we take a look at our earth-facing disc you can see a big coronal hole that's now rotating off of the sun's west limb that had been sending us some fast solar wind but it really wasn't enough to bump us up to storm levels just kind of active conditions and since then there's not been a lot going on but if you take a look at the east limb in earth's view you can see region 2886 and 2887 those regions have been boosting that solar flux for amateur radio operators and emergency responders but you know what there's even more on the sun's far side that's the where the real story is now if we take a look at stereo's view that's looking at the sun from the far side just a little bit you can see region 2886 and 20 region 2887 but you can also see one two three four new regions and look at these regions boy they're active they're gurgling and burgling and firing off solar storms and could potentially give us some new m flare players some big flare players here in the next few days so as these regions rotate into earth view over this next week we are going to keep all eyes on the sun for more details on this week's space weather including how those new active regions might affect you come check out my channel or see me at space weatherwoman.com before this week's show comes to a close let's thank the citizens of tomorrow that continued support helped the channel a huge deal bringing you these weekly updates and the return of the tomorrow live show if you want to join the escape velocity orbital sub orbital or ground support citizens head on over to youtube.com forward slash tlmorrow forward slash join or just hit the blue join button which is next to the subscribe button just in case you forgot the live shows are returning with all bit 14 episode one airing at zero hundred utc on the 30th of october live from station 204 and if you remember on youtube you also get a nice badge next to your name when asking questions in the chat box you also get access to some exclusive emojis on top of that i hope we will catch you then as well as next week for next weekend's episode of tomorrow news but for now thank you for watching and goodbye