Who bought Stratolaunch? | SPACE NEWS

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 steppes of Kazakhstan. Lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on October 9 at 10.17.56 Universal Time, a Russian Proton rocket purchased via International Launch Services lofted two payloads, one being the Eutelsat-5 West B communications satellite and the other being Northrop Grumman's first mission extension vehicle, also known as MEV-1. 16 hours after liftoff, separation of both spacecraft was confirmed, both placed into a high-altitude elliptical super-synchronous transfer orbit. Eutelsat-5 West B will be replacing the old Eutelsat-5 West A, 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 Eutelsat-901, a communications satellite currently in a graveyard orbit. It will attach itself physically to Eutelsat-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 Eutelsat-901 back to the graveyard orbit. Eutelsat is paying $13 million a year for MEV-1 services, and that will most certainly be easily remade during the operations of Eutelsat-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 L-1011 carrier jet, Stargazer, at 02.02 Universal Time on October 11th, its solid first stage ignited and carried NASA's Ionosphere 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 Mahia Peninsula at 01.24 Universal Time on October 16th was Rocket Lab's Electron on its As the Crow Flies mission. A successful ascent saw it deploy AstroDigital's Palisade experimental microsatellite. And holy moly, would you take a look at that view of the kick stage from the second stage. All right, 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 space flight 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 space flight bonanza. Boeing has announced that they'll be performing their pad abort test of Starliner on November 4th. This is 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 V in the N22 configuration. N 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 crewed test flight, no idea. Boeing hasn't said anything yet. And if you'd like to know more about both Boeing's pad 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 crewed 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. Both 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. 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 spaceflights. Stratolaunch is the red-headed stepchild of spaceflight. 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. Stratolaunch 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. I think that there may be a few clues as to who the new owner is. In 2018, Stratolaunch 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 Stratolaunch. 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 Stratolaunch actually knows who owns them now. But, uh, yeah, can't say 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, you know, like in the past couple of weeks, 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 Charged 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 in 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. These 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? And 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 donut. 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 neighbour 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 6Gs of force during re-entry, might not be ideal. Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser mini space plane, which looks so adorably cute, could be that smooth ride, peaking at around 2Gs. And this is what Dream Chaser 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. Tammeth Escott. We are in suspense mode this week. While the 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's 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 disk. 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's strike zone here around the weekend, and that's going to be storm number one. And it could bring us some aurora to 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 Earth view 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 disk. That one is the one that's going to be rotating into Earth view, 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've 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 coronal holes rotated in through the Earth's strike zone, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Alexei 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, Alexei 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 corps in the United States and the Soviet Union and also the art world as well. Born in 1934, Alexei's father was arrested during Stalin's purges, but was eventually released. During the time his father was away, Alexei 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 Vashkod 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. 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 Vashkod 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 Vashkod 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 canceled. 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 on to 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 Oklahomansky. 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 gonna wanna tune in this Saturday at 1800 Universal Time for Tomorrow's Space. And our live interview this week is going to be with Robin Haig, 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. And 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 gonna 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. 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