We Almost Lost the ISS? | TMRO:News

Well, howdy citizens of tomorrow. It's Jared. Yes, it has been a very long time since we have had Tomorrow News period, let alone since I have actually been on this channel, but we're glad to be back because we've got a lot to cover. Oh, we've got a whole bunch from the past month. We've got some blue, we've got some flips, we've got some valves, we've got some astros, we've got some FAA and a whole spattering of other things for you to enjoy. Now, before we get started, of course, just want to remind you that if you like what we do here at Tomorrow, don't forget to subscribe to us, like our video, comment below, share it around, just basically add to the algorithm food to get us in front of as many folks as possible so we can get everyone excited about space. So without further ado, sit back and relax or lean forward and discombobulate. It is time for your Tomorrow News for August 30th, 2021. So yeah, we've been away for a while and it's great to be back and it's great to see you again. Glad you're here. But we've got to go ahead and get into a whole bunch of things to talk about, right? And one of those really big things that happened almost immediately after our previous Tomorrow News episode was that the other billionaire in the suborbital space race, Jeff Bezos, finally took his suborbital hop. On July 20th, the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, Jeff Bezos with his brother Mark Bezos, teenager Oliver Damien, and aerospace legend Wally Funk went on a little bit of a ride, beginning ascent from Blue Origin Site 1 at 1311 Universal Time. Lifting off in RSS First Step, sitting atop of the fourth New Shepard booster, the four spaceflight participants went through a smooth ascent and separation on a suborbital hop to space, reaching a peak altitude of 107 kilometers and a maximum speed of 3,595 kilometers an hour, which crew member Wally Funk seemed to enjoy greatly. After shutdown of the main engine and separation of the capsule from the booster, everyone on board unstrapped and floated around for a few minutes, playing around with their own orientation and items that they had brought along while admiring the view of the Earth outside the window. However, what goes up must come down. And with time running short, all four of the crew got back into their seats, strapped in and received a 5G deceleration welcome back during descent. The booster used to lift the crewed capsule landed safely, and then the capsule itself landed under parachutes at 1321 Universal Time, with a mission duration of 10 minutes and 18 seconds. Shortly after landing, all four crew members exited RSS First Step with a swagger that could be described as grinning from ear to ear. Because this crew traversed over an altitude of 50 miles, which is recognized in the United States as the boundary of space, they technically went to space, which means that there have now been four additional people added to that total, which brings it up to 587 overall. Now, if you think that space does begin at 50 miles or does not, that's sort of a debate that we'll have a little bit later. So hold on to that for just, just a second, okay? Because there are some numbers that are indisputable. And those numbers are that this flight set a record for both the youngest and the oldest person to go to space. Now, originally in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut German Titov set the record during the Vostok 2 mission. He was 25 years old. But thanks to this flight, Oliver Damien now holds the record for youngest person to go to space, being 18 years old. Oliver hasn't even started his first semester at college yet, but let's be honest with ourselves here. Going to space as a part of your summer break sounds a lot better than band camp. The other record set was for the oldest person to fly into space. Originally that was held by astronaut legend John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, which he did in 1962 on the Friendship 7 mission when he was 41 years old. He then returned to space aboard space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist for the STS-95 mission in 1998 at the ripe age of 77 years old. He'll still retain the title of oldest person to reach earth orbit. But we respectfully request that Senator Glenn please make a little bit of room as aviation legend Wally Funk is now the oldest person to have ever gone to space outright at the age of 82. And she was absolutely ecstatic about the flight. The official cost of a flight aboard New Shepard is still not public, but it was noted that Blue Origin does have about a hundred million dollars in private sales for New Shepard flights and that sounds like quite a lot of money and I mean kind of depends on the price of a ticket, right? But the overall feeling is that this was a fantastic accomplishment for all involved and it is. Opening up space to as many people as possible as rapidly as possible is something we here at Tomorrow can get fully behind. So congrats to the whole crew at Blue Origin. We're looking forward to those upcoming crewed New Shepard flights. However, suborbital spaceflight is about to receive a bit of an overhaul in its terminology as the Federal Aviation Administration is looking to change what exactly qualifies someone to be a commercial astronaut. For those who need a refresher, back in late 2004, the experimental space plane Spaceship One took flight and won the Ansari X Prize, a competition that required a non-government organization to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Pilots Mike Melville and Brian Binney received the first commercial astronaut wings. It'd be another 14 years before more were issued, this time to Mark Stuckey and C.J. Struckrow for the first powered flight of Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two to exceed 50 miles in altitude. Shortly after, pilots David McKay and Michael Masucci along with Virgin Galactic chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses received their commercial astronaut wings as well. So it seems pretty cut and dry as to what qualifies you as a commercial astronaut, which is basically be on a private flight and cross 50 miles in altitude. But what happens when Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and others start flying very frequently? Well, the Federal Aviation Administration asked themselves exactly this and they started to set some hard criteria that they are now laying down. First and foremost, you have to have met federal regulations for qualification and crew training. In addition to flying on an FAA licensed flight and cross 50 miles in altitude, the new addition straight from the regs, crew members are required to have demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety or contributed to human spaceflight safety. Essentially that means that folks who purchase a ticket on a suborbital flight and then take videos of themselves doing backflips through the cabin just to put on their TikTok will not be getting astronaut wings. You actually have to do something of significance to get those wings. So by applying this new criteria, that would mean the crew of NS-16 Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Damien would not qualify for astronaut wings. They were passengers. There were no true demonstrated activities. They were just along for the ride while the computer handled the flight. And Branson's flight for Virgin Galactic, that one obviously doesn't qualify anybody for astronaut wings, right? Well, actually you could make an argument that yes, they do get wings. Pilots Dave McKay and Michael Masucci are obviously doing something of significance, but what about everyone else? Well, Beth Moses and Colin Bennett continued to evaluate the experience that customers would go through and Sirisha Vandala operated an experiment during the microgravity portion of the flight. As for Richard Branson, he too was, in his own words at least, evaluating the customer experience. And that's very much a stretch if you ask me, but I think this time it's something that we can allow. In addition to all of that, the FAA has said that they will also come out with a honorary astronaut wing as well. Now these are given to folks who may not have necessarily fit all of the criteria for the official commercial astronaut wings, but they have done something that has been a major contribution. So without a single doubt, we need to get Wally Funk some astronaut wings pronto. So now I want to ask all of you, what do you think of these new regulations from the FAA that define what a commercial astronaut is? Should folks who are along for the ride get those commercial astronaut wings or do the wings that Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin hand out as official astronaut wings for having flown on a flight with that specific company work well enough? Does Virgin Galactic even count since their flights don't cross the Karman line? Does the proposed McDowell line at 50 miles being space make more sense to begin with? Well let us know in those comments and maybe have a respectful debate or two below. Tomorrow we're quite eager to see what you all have to say. When new vehicles or parts of the International Space Station arrive at it, it's usually a time for celebration of it finally being there and then unloading the payload, packing things, and getting it set up for operations. And unfortunately with a new module from Russia, it was a little bit rocky. Nyoka is a new science module from Roscosmos. Originally intended to be a module installed during the opening days of the International Space Station if needed, construction was halted on the mostly built module in the late 1990s. Finally in 2004, Nyoka was revived and scheduled to launch in 2007, which it then promptly didn't. Slow construction, quality control issues, botched repairs, and a global pandemic delayed its launch until just a few weeks ago on July 21st at 1458 Universal Time, riding a proton rocket to low earth orbit. But with a troubled past came a troubled present and things started to go very very wrong very quickly. Immediately there were losses of telemetry and a propulsion system issue began, delaying its first orbit raising maneuver by a day. As the problem settled down, Nyoka rendezvoused with the International Space Station for docking on July 29th. However the approach was beset with issues, keeping Nyoka on the correct trajectory. So much so that at one point it had to rotate itself 180 degrees and perform a retrograde burn maneuver to get back on track. During the final approach both its TORU and KERS automated docking systems developed problems, once again sending it off course. The cosmonauts Oleg Novitski and Peter Dubrov stepped in taking manual control, helping Nyoka finally dock to the station at 1329 Universal Time. Alrighty, finally Nyoka's docked to the International Space Station. All the bad things are done, we're good from this point right? Right? While the crew was performing its task of leak checks before officially opening the new module's hatch, a software glitch commanded Nyoka to fire its thrusters. The Zvezda service module began firing its own thrusters to counteract Nyoka's, but it was eventually overwhelmed and it handed over countering to the Progress MS-17 resupply vehicle. After 44 minutes the propellant aboard Nyoka was depleted and its thrusters stopped firing, having forced the International Space Station through one and a half rotations, requiring a half turn of correction from Progress MS-17 to get back to its correct attitude. For the first time in the history of the International Space Station, a spacecraft emergency was declared. That opening of the hatch to Nyoka? Nope, they stopped doing that immediately and resealed it. They went around the space station to close all of the windows just in case the thrusters may mess with them and fog them up and other things such as that. Crew Dragon Endeavor was fired up just in case an egress was needed and the space station could have potentially needed to have been abandoned, but luckily things were eventually brought under control. After some time, things finally were under control and in the initial reporting it was stressed that nothing major had gone wrong and that the astronauts weren't in danger at any time. However, that was spoken under the initial assumption that the space station had only moved about 45 degrees off attitude. It was only after when the data had been reviewed that they realized it had done a full 540 degrees, which is a little bit more stressful on the station itself than say 45 degrees. This excellent visualization by Liam Kennedy from ISS Above shows the drama unfolding. This is about an hour's worth of telemetry showing the attitude of the International Space Station and as you can see it was spinning at a pretty good clip and of course yes this is clearly sped up, but when calculated to real time the station was rotating at times around nearly half a degree per second. Half a degree per second? That doesn't sound like it's really all that big right? Well you got to remember the space station it's uh it's a pretty big thing. We always see it as this magic castle gracefully floating in the sky but in reality it's a platform 109 meters wide and 73 meters long weighing 440,000 kilograms hurtling at seven and a half kilometers per second. The last thing you want to do is put any sort of force into it that's not supposed to be occurring. NASA noted that the astronauts were never in danger but that was before the actual concrete details of just how much and how fast the station had moved became public knowledge. Ultimately Roscosmos laid blame on software errors and a full investigation is underway. It's still not great to hear NASA downplaying the situation as if nothing major had occurred. This was a legitimate spacecraft emergency. The International Space Station could possibly had to have been evacuated and potentially abandoned because of that evacuation. So this was no small moment. This was definitely something that would have put people and astronauts and many others in jeopardy. So to hear NASA kind of just nonchalantly talking about it that really just doesn't feel all that great. And it wasn't just the International Space Station where significant issues hampered operations. Boeing's second Starliner test flight got off to a rocky start by not starting at all. An issue during the countdown involving propellant valves in the service module scrubbed the launch. This required the Atlas V to be rolled back to the vertical integration facility at Space Launch Complex 41. Once inside a thorough investigation commenced and it was found the oxidizer for Starliner's reaction control system, nitrogen tetroxide, had saturated the valve's Teflon seals. And when interacting with moisture on the other side of the valve it created nitric acid which corroded the valves keeping them stuck in the closed position. Nine of the valves on Starliner were fixed and returned back to being functional but four of them exhausted all of the options available. So Starliner had to be removed from the top of its Atlas V rocket and taken back to its processing facility. It's unknown if Boeing will replace all 13 valves or only the four that were affected and frankly it's incredibly disappointing and frustrating to see Boeing continuing to struggle. Commercial crew is a program in need of assured access. Single source is not the way to go so two providers is a must. The fact that an issue as big as a potential valve problem wasn't caught early until the countdown proper for launch is disconcerting but if there's a silver lining to be had it's that this issue was found on the ground and unlike the issue in their first one, not in flight. With a busy schedule ahead for both vehicles visiting the International Space Station and the upcoming launch window of the Trojan asteroid visiting science mission Lucy, Starliner even if it was fixed today won't have an opportunity to launch until November at the earliest. But there are a few things that have launched so let's go ahead and jump into space traffic where we will cover a select group of launches up until about mid-August. Starting out on July 21st leaving launch complex 200 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1458 universal time a classic Proton-M began Roscosmos Nyoka module's journey to the International Space Station. A successful ascent placed Nyoka into a temporary parking orbit where the issues began near immediately for the module as discussed earlier in our episode but the Proton rocket performed flawlessly in its first launch in nearly a year. While staying within the eastern hemisphere we now move from the northern to southern hemisphere where at 0600 on July 29th a Rocket Lab Electron lifted off from launch complex 1A at the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand on its second return to flight. The classified mission called It's Little Chile up here spelt ch-i-l-e is a reference to the popular green chili plant from the state of New Mexico where the classified United States Department of Defense payload is being operated. The payload was successfully placed into its operational orbit. To South America we go for some rumble in the jungle. An Ariane 5 carrying two satellites Eutelsat Quantum for Eutelsat and Star 1 D2 for Embratel Star 1 cleared the pad at launch area 3 at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou French Guiana at 2100 universal time on July 30th. A successful climb into space saw both satellites placed into their respective proper geostationary transfer orbits. Now heading to China a solid-fueled Hyperbola 1 developed by the commercial space firm iSpace lifted off from site 95B at the Zheguan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia on August 3rd at 0739 universal time. Very little information has been released but what is known is that the payload fairing of the rocket did not separate as planned leading to an unsuccessful mission. This flight was Hyperbola 1's return to flight after an anomaly during a launch attempt in February and only the third flight of the Hyperbola 1 rocket. The United States got in on the action with a Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems Antares in the 230 plus configuration lifting off from launch pad 0A within Wallops Island at 2201 universal time on August 10th. Cygnus NG-16 the SS Ellison Onizuka is named after the first Asian American to fly to space. A mission specialist Ellison Onizuka flew on STS-51C and he was also a mission specialist on STS-51L the final flight of Space Shuttle Challenger. A successful ascent placed Cygnus NG-16 on the path to rendezvous with the International Space Station carrying roughly 3,700 kilograms of payload and experiments. And we wrap up space traffic in India at the Satish Dhawan Space Center where an Indian space research organization GSLV Mark 2 launch vehicle departed second launch pad on August 12th at 0013 universal time carrying the EOS-03 payload to be sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit where it would eventually provide real-time high resolution images of Earth. However during ascent the third stage of the rocket failed to ignite causing the payload to be unable to reach its intended orbit and incur a total loss. EOS-03 was intended to be operated as a pair with another satellite EOS-05 performing the same task but it is presently unknown how this failure will affect the program. And here are your upcoming launches. And as we wrap up this edition of Tomorrow News we want to thank all of the citizens of Tomorrow who help make this possible. Your support is what helps make our show. It's not an overstatement at all to say that you're the reason why we're able to do what we can do. Something like Tomorrow News has time and effort invested into it that would be tremendously more difficult to do without your support. So thank you citizens so much for helping us out. And if you'd like to become a join to check out all of the levels that we have available. Other ways that you can help as well include watching us, liking our videos, comment, subscribing, sharing, and overall feeding the algorithm as you help us pursue our goal to get everyone excited about living amongst the stars. Keep your eyes and ears peeled everybody because tomorrow Ryan is going to be dropping a chunky SpaceX update with additional stories and launches for your consideration. So until we see each other again remember everybody stay safe, stay healthy, and keep exploring. Two minutes 20 seconds into flight everything's still proceeding nominal. you