 Welcome everyone, how are we all doing? How does winning a seat a space sound or even the construction of some of these spaceports in your own country? If that sort of stuff excites you, I'd recommend you stick around not only with tomorrow but also with this episode of the news, which is for the week of June 4th 2021. Discovery Channel has just announced a new show called Who Wants To Be An Astronaut, and whilst it sounds like an intergalactic knockoff of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, it isn't. The main prize for the winner of the show isn't one million pounds, it is a seat on an upcoming Axiom space mission, which will most likely be AX2. I've talked about AX1 previously on the show when the mission was first announced, and the start of 2022 is when that mission is planned to leave the earth. On board of that mission will be Michael Lopez Alagria, Larry Connor, Mark Pathy and Aiton Stibb. If AX1 launches when scheduled, it will also make it the second fully private spaceflight in human history. We've also had confirmation from Elon Musk that the first orbital flight of Super Heavy will include some very nice hot gas thrusters. These, for those of you who don't know, are the small, in relative terms, thrusters dotted around the vehicle used to orient the vehicle when in flight. These are obviously going to be very useful in flight, especially when it's coming in for its landing slash ocean touchdown slash just get the booster back on earth maneuver, which is something I discussed on last week's episode of the news. Ever since SN15's return to South Texas, everybody outside of SpaceX has been wondering the exact same thing. What on earth are they doing with that grain silo? SpaceX probably did some umming and aring and finally settled on moving the Starship vehicle back to the production site. Whether this is for more checks, refurbishment, or deconstruction, we don't know yet, but the company will want to collect the maximum amount of data they can from the flight to ensure success could be repeated in the future. Another section of the integration tower has also arrived and been stacked on top, being the third segment we've seen constructed, excluding the concrete foundations at the bottom. The thrust puck for Super Heavy, which is the plate where all the raptor engines will attach, has also been spotted at the construction site. This is good news as it shows that SpaceX are actually serious at going orbital by the end of the year, with this part most likely going to BN2 or BN3. We've also received some more juicy information from the man himself, Elon Musk, stating that the company is approaching the point where they can churn out a new raptor engine every 48 hours. This means they have enough capacity to make the engines for a new Super Heavy booster in under two months. That is incredible, although it will limit the team to around five flights a year at the current rate. Finally this week in the world of SpaceX, the test tank dubbed BN2.1 has been transported down the road from the production site at Starbase to the launch complex, where a lot of testing is planned to take place in preparation for the full flight of BN3 later this year. It seems to be a relatively good time if you are a productive billionaire involved in space flight. That is because Jeff Bezos has just announced who will be going on the first crewed New Shepard flight and most notably out of those is himself. Announcing it on his Instagram account, Jeff has said that he and his brother Mark will be going on a suborbital hop on this upcoming July 20th, the anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Now this comes a month after Blue Origin announced that they were now satisfied enough with the development of New Shepard to have the confidence to finally fly meat. And if you'd like to take that flight with Jeff, you are able to do so through an online auction, which currently the highest bid is a cool $2.8 million to take that ride. So if you really want to do it, give it a shot. Go ahead and throw in your bid. I know that even though I'm just clearly loaded with cash, I will be waiting on putting on my bid until a little bit closer to when it ends on June 12th. And it wasn't just a suborbital hop finally getting its passengers that surprised us this week. No, we finally have NASA returning to a target that has neglected for over three decades. And that is Venus. Yes, Venus, missions to Venus. Yes. And it was a serious surprise when not one, but two missions were announced, Da Vinci and Veritas. And let's go ahead and talk about Veritas first, which stands for Venus Emissivity Radio Science in Tsar Topography and Spectroscopy. And I thought Osiris Rex was the peak of Bacronyms. Veritas is an orbiter and its primary instrument will be a cloud penetrating synthetic aperture radar. The previous NASA mission to Venus, Magellan, which spent the early nineties there also had a synthetic aperture radar, but the one on Veritas will yield topographical maps of much higher resolution. Magellan can give us roughly 250 meters of resolution, but Veritas is going to be somewhere around 30 meters. So just under an order of magnitude better. Veritas will also carry a multi-spectral near infrared emissivity mapping instrument, which is a big fancy way of saying a system that will capture multiple wavelengths of infrared light, which can help figure if Venus may have active volcanism and other things about its atmosphere. Da Vinci is the other mission that we'll be going to Venus, and that one is going to be doing one of the most difficult engineering challenges that you can tackle in our own solar system. And that is plunging deep into the depths of the crushing, cooking, caustic atmosphere of Venus down to its surface. Another almost certain Bacronyms standing for deep atmosphere Venus investigation of noble gases, chemistry, and imaging plus, this is an atmospheric probe that will descend via parachute to the Venusian surface, taking data from a suite of instruments with the intention of getting all the way down. Now on the way it'll sniff out composition and taste the atmosphere and take high resolution imagery, hopefully revealing more of the rarest planetary surface we've ever been able to peep at. There's also an orbiter component to Da Vinci, and it will have infrared instrumentation on board that will allow it to complement the readings that the atmospheric probe will get as it slides down the atmosphere into the surface. Now Da Vinci and Veritas are both a part of NASA's Discovery Program. This means that they are cost capped at $500 million, so they cannot go above that $500 million mark, and launch is expected in the closing years of the 2020s. And those two missions are not the only ones that are on the agenda for Venus. No, you may recall that Rocket Lab has expressed interest in doing their own mission to Venus, but they first have to make progress on that previous failure that they've had with their electron rocket. Peter Beck, Rocket Lab CEO, has described the anomaly as a complex failure in need of an intricate and layered failure analysis. Now even with this coming from Peter, there is still approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to allow Rocket Lab to resume flights of electron, and that's a pretty interesting tidbit, as usually that occurs after the problem has been found and rectified. So I'm looking forward to hearing from Rocket Lab as to what the issue may have been and what they did for the fix. Something in need of an investigation that only really requires your eyes has just occurred on the International Space Station. The cannon arm, too, took a debris strike, which was found during a routine inspection through astronaut photography on May 12th. Now the object that struck cannon arm, too, was too small to track. This highlights the need for tracking orbital debris and the fact that it's starting to get a little crowded up there. Now current operations of the cannon arm, too, are completely unaffected and the daily operations at the International Space Station continue as planned. And as planned from a few weeks ago where we talked about a potential delay for the James Webb Space Telescope launching, yes it's been officially, officially delayed just a few weeks in order to rectify that issue with the payload ferrying on the Ariane 5. So for once it's a delay that does not involve the James Webb Space Telescope itself, but the launch vehicle that it is going to be riding on. And if you ask me, better delayed than destroyed, we'll go ahead and take that. And speaking of launches, I'm going to throw it back to Ryan, who's going to be talking about launching rockets from a place that I hadn't even ever considered taking rockets and sending them the space from. When you think of satellite launches, the United Kingdom is probably one of the last places you'd think of, but that could all change in the summer of next year. On May 24th some new regulations were passed in Parliament that will allow the construction and development of spaceports for the first time on mainland Great Britain, with some planned for, unsurprisingly Scotland and surprisingly Wales and Cornwall. Those of you familiar with the geography of the UK will probably be asking how on earth are you going to launch east from the west coast of the country? Well, you can't. Instead these spaceports are going to be dedicated to horizontal launch directions, being able to support Virgin Orbit's Cosmic Gull and the Launcher One vehicles. Now, while I was hoping for rockets that go up, at least the stuff being launched will still make it to space. For the time being it seems that Scotland will be getting all of the vertical launch action. Unsurprisingly, Albex is already integrated into these new spaceports, being the sole planned launcher from Space Hub Sutherland. Lockheed Martin has also been interested with them planning launches at the Shetland Space Centre. Being British, it is very exciting to hear about the potential of launches coming to the country next year. Obviously, we tried before for Australia, but that's on the other side of the world. Something I'm going to tackle now is the space traffic report, with a rather juicy number of earth departures being five. Lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1859 UTC on May 26th, the final batch of satellites of the Starlink Shell One were lifted to their 550km low earth orbit atop the B1063 booster. The second flight of that booster came to a very what has become normal end, landing 620km downrange on the drone ship, just read the instructions. The fairings weren't new either, with the active half that holds all the expensive gubbins, having flown on four previous missions to the passive half, and the half without the expensive gubbins, feverishly supporting two missions. Next up, another internet satellite launch being one Web 7. Taking off at 1738 UTC atop this Soyuz 2.1B rocket from Site 1S at the Vistatrony Cosmodrome in Russia, all 5,317kg of satellites are heading for a polar low earth orbit. And next up this week, we have a launch from China. Tianzhao-2 is the first cargo resupply mission to their new space station called Tiangong-3. Lifting off from LC201 at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island at 1256 UTC on May 29th, the core module of the station, successfully accepted this vehicle on the aft port of the segment, making this mission also a Tiangong-3 arrival. This is very exciting for China as the construction of their new space station is getting well underway, with the first official launch to it and the first successful docking. Guess what everybody, it's another launch from China, this time being a Long March 3B from LC203 at the Zhixiang Satellite Launch Center in China at 1625 UTC on June 2nd. On board is the FengYang 4B Geostationary Meteorology Satellite, which is one of China's second-generation geo-weather satellites, and it is currently heading for a geostationary orbit. And finally this week, another launch from SpaceX, lifting off from Launch Complex 39A in Florida at 1729 UTC on June 3rd, the brand new B1067 booster, the first new booster we've seen this year, carried Dragon C209 into the skies, which is currently headed for the International Space Station. This is also a brand new Dragon vehicle, with no launch escape motors and no crew on board, however it is reusing the heat shield that was used on the demo 2 mission, which carried Bob Benken and Doug Hurley to the ISS. Roughly 8 minutes after the launch from the Cape B1067 successfully touched down on of course I still love you, 400 kilometers downrange, and now let's have a look at some upcoming launches. And here is your space weather with Dr. Timothy Scove. Although the space weather this week isn't quite as exciting as last week, Region 2824 has still been up to its old tricks. As we take a look at our frontside sun, you can see Region 2824 as it's just about to rotate off of the sun's west limb. It fires off a near M class flare and launches a massive solar storm. This solar storm is the one that's actually going to be grazing earth off to the west here in the next day or so, but it also launched a radiation storm. It's the first radiation storm we've had of this new cycle and even though it only lasted a little bit more than a day, it's definitely a wake-up call to let us know that these events are getting more eruptive and getting stronger. Meanwhile, we also have a coronal hole that's going to be sending us some fast solar wind as it rotates in through the earth strike zone. So on top of that solar storm that's going to graze us to the west, we're going to expect a little bit of undisturbed conditions here over the next few days, possibly active to maybe even storm levels until things begin to calm down. Now, as we switch to our far-sided sun, this is Stereo A and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side. You can see the new regions developing, that's region 2827 in the north and 2828 in the south, and you can see some regions behind it as well. And some of these regions, especially the ones in the south, are becoming eruptive. So it looks like we will continue to have more solar storm players in the future and possibly a chance for big flares once again. So it looks like solar cycle 25 is really ramping up. Switching to our D-Rap model, now this is a model of the upper layer of the ionosphere in our upper atmosphere that gets hammered from things like solar flares and solar radiation storms. And as we take a look early on the 29th, you can watch but high latitudes both in the south and in the north, that intensity beginning to ramp up. This is what we call polar cap absorption. And it's because we've got these energetic particles raining down on our upper atmosphere. Now granted, this particular storm did not last all that long and it really wasn't all that intense. But storms like these that are much more long lasting and far more intense, do impact communications and navigation at high latitudes. So as solar cycle continues to ramp up, expect to see this model a lot more often because we're going to start seeing a lot more of these kinds of storms. For more details on this week's Space Weather, including more information on how radiation storms might affect space traffic and how this coming solar storm could affect you, come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. Before we head out for the first show of June, let's all thank the citizens of tomorrow. The wonderful people in the escape velocity orbital, suborbital and ground support ranks all financially aid the show and make it physically possible. It is very true that without their support, we wouldn't be around for much longer or at the production level that we are at today. If you want to join them, head on over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join to support for as little as a dollar a month. Even if you don't want to support us financially, just sharing the show with your family and friends helps a great deal as spreading the exciting stuff happening within the world of space is what this show is all about. For now, however, it's time to go. So stay safe and goodbye.