SpaceX Starlink launches and Astronaut blood clots

Hello, citizens of Earth, and welcome aboard Station 204. Now, we've got one hell of a space news episode ready for you this week. We've got some borts. We've got some health issues. We've got some Venus action. So why wait? Let's go ahead and dive straight into space traffic and get this started. And we have a release. We start in orbit with JAXA's HTV-8 cargo freighter being released by the Canada Arm II on November 1 at 1721 Universal Time. After delivering supplies and much-needed battery upgrades to the International Space Station, HTV-8 was loaded up with trash and equipment tagged for disposal. It deorbited and performed an intentional destructive reentry on November 3 at 0209 Universal Time. The first upgraded Northrop Grumman Antares 230-plus rocket left the pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia on November 2 at 1359 Universal Time, lifting the heaviest supply load carried by a US cargo vehicle. The Antares 230-plus rocket's upgrades include removal of some insulation, a new fairing, simplified avionics and tank systems, and a beefed-up aft structure, allowing the RD-181 engines to run at full throttle. It successfully placed Cygnus NG-12, dubbed the SS Allen Bean in honor of the late astronaut, into an orbit to catch up with the ISS. Hey, Northrop, can I get a few nominals? Nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal. Blasting off at 0322 Universal Time on November 3 from the Tiananmen Space Center, the Long March-4B rocket successfully lofted a rideshare payload that included a Chinese Earth Observation Satellite, Gaofen-7, a breakthrough French-Chinese experimental Iodine Propulsion CubeSat, and a small sat for the country of Sudan. The arm is now over the pin. Alignment looking good. Arriving on November 4, the SS Allen Bean was captured by the Canada Arm II on the International Space Station at 0910 Universal Time, with berthing, or docking, depending upon who you ask, occurring shortly after at 1121 Universal Time. Now, my favorite experiment on board absolutely has to be the Zero-G oven, which has already successfully baked a cookie, even though the physics of cooking in microgravity is wildly different compared to cooking on Earth. Now, you'll also note that Cygnus NG-11, the SS Roger Chaffee, it's still in orbit. Northrop Grumman is gaining experience in operating separate spacecraft at the same time, and also potentially providing Cygnus vehicles as a long-term microgravity experiment platform. Continuing to build out its own homegrown navigation system, China launched a new Beidou navigation satellite on November 4 at 1743 Universal Time on a Long March 3D rocket. Successfully placed into a geostationary transfer orbit, the Beidou satellite will expend its own fuel over the next few weeks to reach a very special high inclination geosynchronous orbit. This is pretty neat to me that China is the only country with navigation satellites in geosynchronous orbit. 3, 2, 1, 0. Ignition. Liftoff. With gratitude to our veterans today, and always, go USA. Now, wrapping it up this week, we're catching some sun along the beaches of Cape Canaveral in Florida, as this company called SpaceX, who hasn't launched a rocket in three months, decided now was as good a time as ever. Saying goodbye to Earth at 1456 Universal Time on November 11, all was well as this particular stage one, B1048, made its fourth flight. This is the first stage one booster to do so. After separation in stage two ignition, the standard turn and burn saw what appeared to be the smoothest stage one landing ever. And look, the video feed didn't even drop out. Maybe SpaceX finally listened to the geniuses on Reddit and used a buoy. Also, another milestone for a Falcon 9, the first reflight of payload fairings. These particular fairings had flown on the Arabsat-6A Falcon heavy launch earlier this year. Once successfully reaching its target orbit, the 60 Starlink satellites, the heaviest payload a Falcon 9 has ever lifted, were deployed. Now, they're going to spread out over the next few weeks and begin work to make Starlink an operational constellation and a headache for astronomers. And here are your upcoming departures. Now, for a few weeks now, we have been talking about upcoming abort tests that both SpaceX and Boeing will be doing with Crew Dragon and Starliner, respectively. SpaceX's in-flight abort test is still on the horizon, but Boeing just completed its pad abort test with its Starliner. And they got a little additional sort of, ooh, what could possibly happen if this goes wrong in their test. 3, 2, 1, 0. Now, if you're like me and you thought you were hung over watching the camera work in this, don't worry. I was, too. Luckily, there was some actual stable footage taken of the test. 2, 1, 0. Lift off. Roll complete. L-A cutoff. 180,000 pounds of thrust from its four launch abort engines and 12 orbital maneuvering and altitude control rockets zipped the Starliner capsule away at 5 G's of acceleration. 5 G's of acceleration, that is a bit of a kick in the pants. Woo! Upon reaching apogee, a quick turnaround of the capsule saw drogue parachutes and then main parachutes deployed. The service module separated, and then the main parachutes opened, although you'll notice that only two of the expected three main parachutes actually opened. Then the heat shield was jettisoned, airbags for cushioning the landing of Starliner inflated, and then the capsule touched down. It was a quick 95-second flight. It went by pretty darn fast, but there sure was a lot to be learned from it. Now, the Boeing engineers say that the third parachute just flat out didn't deploy. They're still gonna take a look at it, even though the parachutes used on the pad abort Starliner are not the same parachutes that are used on the space-worthy Starliner. And that space-worthy Starliner's rocket, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V, which is gonna fly in the N22 configuration, it's currently being stacked in Cape Canaveral on track for a December 17th launch. I wanted to talk to you all about a previously unknown risk of human spaceflight. An astronaut on the International Space Station has suffered from a blood clot in the vein that carries the blood back from their brain. And if we wanna have a future where Starship from SpaceX is taking hundreds of people to live in space, we're gonna have to learn to prevent and treat this issue. Astronauts were performing an ultrasound on a crew member's neck on the International Space Station and found a clot blocking their internal jugular vein. And if you're like me and freak out about how you treat a blocked vein in your neck, well, on Earth, you can be treated with anticoagulants that stop the clot getting bigger and stops the formation of new clots, or thrombolytics, which are medicines that dissolve the clot. Here's the downside, though. Anticoagulants stop your natural ability to clot blood. So you better make sure you don't accidentally cut yourself while taking them. And thrombolytics can increase your risk of bleeding inside your brain. The affected astronaut was treated with anticoagulants for the remainder of the space flight. Now, I don't know who that astronaut was, and I'm not gonna speculate for their medical privacy, and I hope you don't either. This finding caused a review of all the ultrasound data collected so far. And they found another astronaut was discovered to have a partial blockage in their left internal jugular vein. Luckily, though, this astronaut had already returned to Earth. But ultimately, it would be better to prevent blood clots in space altogether. So the Russian Chibis suit was tested as a potential solution. This set of funny-looking pants exposes the legs to a lower pressure and pulls fluid away from the chest and head. Kind of like sticking a vacuum cleaner in your skin, but at a much larger scale. This improved jugular vein blood flow in 59% of cases, but it also worsened it in 12% of cases. Now, imagine for a second that the worst-case scenario happens and an astronaut needs immediate hospital intervention. Today on Soyuz, a medical evacuation from the ISS would take several hours, would place up to six Gs of force on an unwell crew member, and they'd touch down in the remote wilderness of Kazakhstan. Compare that to the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser, which has the ability to land anywhere a regular jumbo jet can, aka much closer to a hospital, and with a much gentler three Gs of force. It's currently only funded by NASA for cargo flights, but perhaps now there is a stronger case to use it for crew. I think this is a great example of why a continuous human presence on the ISS is so important. The more astronauts we study, the greater the chance we're going to discover these rarer risks of human spaceflight. And that makes me really curious, so give me your reasons in the comments below. But even with this increased risk of blood clots in space, would you still be willing to go to orbit? I know I would. And for your weekly orbital space weather update, here's Dr Tamatha Scove. All eyes are on the sun as it's given us some spectacular views over the last couple days. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see the transit of Mercury. Look at it go right there. This is the last time we've got a chance to see this planet transit the sun for more than a decade. So if you didn't catch this view, you're going to have to look at the replay because you won't see it for quite some time. But that's not the only cool thing we've got going on. We also have a coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth's strike zone here in the next four days or so, and it could send us some more fast wind and possibly bring some aurora down to high latitude, so stay tuned for that. But that's not all. We also have a new cycle, cycle 25 sunspot right there in the southern hemisphere. This is the second of these new cycle sunspots we've seen in the past week or so, so we're definitely beginning to ramp up on cycle 25. We're not there yet, but we're getting close. As we switch to our far side sun, you can see this is our partially far-sided monitor. It's kind of looking at the sun from the side. You can see that active region emerge very, very quickly, and it's fizzling and farting and all that. That's really good news to see activity ramp up this quickly because that means that solar cycle 25 is nearly here. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see aurora and what that new cycle sunspot means for your day, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. And to talk a little bit about weather here on Earth and how it compares to weather in the solar system, let's head on back to Earth itself to our very own Jade Kim. Climate change is one of those things on this planet that, no matter who you are or where you come from, affects all of us, and it just so happens that by studying these effects on other planets, we can learn a lot more about our own. Scientists at the University of Buffalo have recently designed a spacecraft that could do exactly that by studying the greenhouse effect on Venus. And guess what? It flaps. The bio-inspired Ray for Extreme Environments and Zonal Explorations, aka BREEZE, was proposed by University of Buffalo for a program at NASA that funds early-stage technologies. The probe would emulate a familiar ocean dweller we've all seen before, the Stingray, aka the majestic C-Flap-Flap. As the craft enters the Venusian atmosphere, its wings would deploy and, you guessed it, flap like a Stingray's. This design would allow the spacecraft to safely and efficiently navigate the tumultuous winds of Venus's upper atmosphere while collecting unprecedented data on weather patterns, volcanic activity, and more. The probe would circumnavigate the planet about once every four to six days, allowing its solar panels to recharge on the day side of Venus before dipping into the night side. This data can actually be applied to Earth matters as well, allowing climate scientists to further their models and perhaps even make better predictions about the fate of our own planet. Similar in size and comprised of comparable materials, Venus was actually once quite similar to Earth until it reached a tipping point and evolved into the evil twin as we know it today. Venus, while beautiful in the night sky, is actually notorious for being one of the most hellish places in the solar system. With a constant surface temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing atmospheric pressure, and clouds that rain sulfuric acid, it's not exactly on the short list of future planets to vacation to. But Venus is a prime, albeit extreme, example of global warming caused by greenhouse gases. It was studying Venus that first inspired scientists to locate the hole in our own ozone layer, which inspired an international effort to cut down on harmful compounds. And discussing climate change on a planet that's not our own might make it more palatable for those who are still skeptical or otherwise unwilling to entertain the conversation due to reasons political or otherwise. And this should come as a pretty deep insight for us humans. That habitability, whether deteriorated by us or not, is transient, and it's definitely something that we shouldn't take for granted. And we want to give a huge shout out to all of our citizens of tomorrow. Without your help, we wouldn't be able to make any of this possible. No news, no letting off steam, nothing. So, if you got something from us and would like to give something back, you can head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join. And you can also head on over to community.tmro.tv to find other ways to help as well. And as always, hitting that subscribe and notification button, liking, sharing, and getting us in front of as many of your friends, family, and other folks as possible helps us pursue the core of our mission, which is to get everyone excited about space. So that does it for this week's Space News episode. And until the next one, keep exploring. Fireworks? Fireworks!