Gotta' Get Some Pentagon Money! | TMRO:News

Hello citizens of Earth and welcome to this week's edition of Tomorrow News. We hope that you sure enjoyed our little break that we had all of us here at Tomorrow Did but now it's time to get back on it and in fact Ryan has a smorgasbord of SpaceX stories to talk about. I'm going to be covering the Pentagon throwing some money at launch services and a bonanza towards the end of that. Now before we officially get into anything of course just want to remind you if you really really like what we do here at Tomorrow don't forget to subscribe, set up notifications, hit the like and share this everywhere that you can. Show us off to all of your friends. So let's go ahead and get started with news for the week of August 25th 2020 and Ryan what's going on down at X? Jim Bridenstine has just confirmed that the Crew-1 mission will not be launched any earlier than October the 23rd meaning that if all goes to plan it will be only a week ahead of its cargo counterpart CRS-21. This also means that only two scheduled missions are planned between now and the first official crewed flight to the ISS being Starlink-10 and GPS-3 SV-04 next month. SpaceX have put out a job offer for a resort development manager in Boca Chica in order to transform the village from a village into a 21st century spaceport and the company's first resort. Now I don't know whether this is a fancy word for hotel or what but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. SN5 and SN6 are currently just sitting around in Boca Chica waiting for their next assignment as the only things that could possibly come up in the future for them are more tests, static fires or hops however what they could be put onto is SN7 and SN8. SN7 is set to use a new alloy for a test tank which will be taken to burst pressure so it probably won't be around for long. SN8 is going to be pretty much a full blown Starship vehicle apart from the important things on the inside needed for human habitation. This means that it will have one of the several nose cones we have seen laying around attached to the top and a couple of those massive body flaps attached to the bottom. Speaking of SN6 it has just been lifted up and placed onto the launch mount. Originally it was just placed onto some pipes to do some testing of the little landing legs that flip out and then finally it was lifted up again and placed onto the launch mount where SN5 once stood. And to round off the SpaceX goodness this week, SpaceX have recently launched a Falcon 9 from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station last Tuesday at 1431 UTC. The payload on board was 58 Starlink satellites for the Starlink-10 mission as well as 3 satellites from Planet to add to their SkySat constellation. This was the 6th flight of a single Falcon 9 booster which sets a brand new record as well as the 6th landing of a Falcon 9 booster which is absolutely bonkers to think about. And as well as those records being set it was also the 99th flight for SpaceX in their history with the Falcon 1 and Falcon Heavies counting towards that goal. Thanks Ryan! Now as Rocket Lab prepares for Electron's return to flight they have also done some tests that are going to be helping on reuse which is only going to be starting up in just a few missions. The final test of the recovery system for Electron's first stage simulated the maximum amount of force that's expected to be exerted on the parachute and it passed with excellent marks. It was only just last year that Rocket Lab announced that they were going to attempt reuse. This came after years of saying that they were not interested in doing so. So what changed the minds at Rocket Lab? Well it was a big big interest in the increase of flight rate without having to increase booster production. Rocket Lab already can lay claim to one of the more cutting edge booster manufacturing processes and they're certainly the leader of the small sat launcher pack and I'm really eager to see how reusability factors in and where that drives them. Now flight 17 is going to be the first attempt at recovery and they're going to be allowing the booster to drop into the ocean. The helicopter catch will come on a later mission. Rocket Lab is still on track for a return to flight sometime in the next six weeks and that will be flight 14. So we've still got a few launches to go before this first attempt. And also, in case you missed it, Rocket Lab just added Mike Griffin, the former 11th administrator of NASA, to their board of directors so they're getting quite a wealth of experience rolling in as well. Now Rocket Lab's test is going to be a few months out and probably going to be occurring in early 2021 but Northrop Grumman just did a test on a rocket of their own that we're going to be talking about not just in this segment but also the next segment as well. The GEM63XL solid strap-on motor will be used by United Launch Alliance on their upcoming Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle. It's generating just under 450,000 pounds of thrust and a 90 second burn kicked off the first of what will be several qualification burns during this round of testing. Northrop Grumman has already delivered three new GEM63 solid motors for use on an Atlas V flight later this year. This is continuing ULA's method of incrementally adding Vulcan Centaur hardware to Atlas V launches for testing. And the GEM63 derives its name from an acronym standing for Graphite Epoxy Motor in reference to the casing with a 63 inch diameter. A standard GEM63 is 20 meters long and a GEM63XL, which was tested here, is 22 meters long. Now as mentioned earlier, there is another story involving ULA's upcoming Vulcan Centaur rocket and in addition to that, SpaceX's entire line of Falcon rockets as well. And it's involving the Pentagon's dollar dollar bills, y'all. The Department of the Air Force officially made public the contracts for a four-way competition, the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 Launch Services Procurement. And in it, a tetrad of launch companies were vying for what are traditionally the best paying contracts a launch service can have bestowed upon them. These are the golden gooses of launch services. You had United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman all putting on their best in order to try to impress the top brass in the United States military. These mission contracts being awarded are for flight between 2022 and 2027 with potentially up to 34 missions. United Launch Alliance offered the upcoming Vulcan Centaur as their bid, SpaceX continued the tried and true duo of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin touted the benefits of New Glenn, and Northrop Grumman's Omega was in the fray. Its future on the record is hinging on the procurement of these contracts. And at the end of the day, the safe bet was taken, as was the old new underdog who sure isn't anymore. ULA and SpaceX were in, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are out. For now. Now as mentioned, these contracts are big big money and that's because the US Air Force has a lot of requirements for their payloads. The launches will be split 60-40, with United Launch Alliance set to fly 60% and SpaceX handling the remaining 40%. ULA was immediately assigned two missions for a combined $337 million, while SpaceX was assigned a single mission for $316 million. You caught that right, ULA is flying two missions for the same cost of a single SpaceX mission. But if you know a little bit about what SpaceX is going to need to do in order to come up to snuff with these United States Air Force payloads, this was no surprise at all. US Air Force and now US Space Force, they're very particular about their payloads. Things such as vertical integration and just how big those payloads are drive the design. SpaceX does not have vertical integration capability yet, so it'll be adding those to both the Cape and Vandenfog. And we've seen in the render of the SlickPad 39A with that nice mobile gantry, that they're also looking at building a massive payload fairing for Falcon Heavy, far larger than anything SpaceX currently flies. So wondering why that mission for SpaceX is nearly double what it is for ULA? Well just look at the requirements and what SpaceX is going to have to do to meet them. Now one of the great plot twists in aerospace is that back in 2014 when the Phase 1 contracts were handed out, the United States Air Force handed them to United Launch Alliance uncontested. They said that they weren't going to give any to SpaceX because ULA had a certified launch vehicle and SpaceX did not. But now here we are six years later in Phase 2 and SpaceX is the only one who got a contract that has a certified launch vehicle now. It's kind of flipped a little bit, hasn't it? Now I'm not exactly saying that the folks at ULA HQ in Centennial, Colorado are breathing a sigh of relief, but Vulcan Centaur certainly has a hell of an anchor customer now. And don't think Rocket Road and Hawthorne is quiet, there's certainly happy echoes off of B-1019. Those upgrades are necessary expenditures and I'm sure Starlink isn't cheap, nor is the Super Heavy Starship combo, even with SpaceX having raised nearly $2 billion recently. Also SpaceX, even with this win, they're still moving forward with its protest of the launch service agreements that were given to ULA, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman back in 2018. And speaking of Blue Origin, there is absolutely no worry there. Jeff, he's dumping a billion of his own bucks every year, so he doesn't care. And Northrop Grumman's Omega, though, well, we're going to have to wait and see how that goes. There was a lot riding for Omega on this with these Phase 2 contracts and the Pentagon has left open the possibility of additional missions, a Phase 2A contract. Those might happen, so that may prevent the demise of Omega living up to its name. But there, you know, has to be a customer for Omega. And actually, they do have one, Saturn Satellite Networks. This is a company that's aiming to deliver medium-sized geosynchronous commsats that weigh a few tons, but Saturn Satellite Networks, they at present have no customers themselves. So we're going to have to see what the future holds. Now, the rumor mill is that Northrop Grumman is moving to cancel Omega, but that is a part of the rumor mill. But here at Tomorrow, we do not entertain rumors. So we're going to wait for official confirmation from Northrop Grumman as to whether Omega lives or not, because rumors are horse sh!t and we don't like spreading that around. Now, let's move from horse sh!t to real sh!t, because we had two launches this week, and let's jump right into space traffic. Departing the Xikon Space Center, a Long March 2D lifted off at 0401 UT on August 6th. It successfully deployed Galfen 904, the fourth satellite in China's Galfen 9 Earth observation program. Declared a success, the observation satellite carries an optical imaging system capable of 1 meter resolution. A small, unnamed secondary satellite from a university in Beijing was also carried to orbit, where it will be used to measure atmospheric density in the Earth's gravitational field. Then giving us a long-missed dose of some rumble in the jungle, an Ariane Space Ariane launched on August 15th at 22.04 UT from the French Guiana Space Center. An upgraded avionics bay, experimental autonomous flight termination system, and payload fairing designed with improvements for the James Webb Space Telescope's ride next year were all flown. A successful launch into geosynchronous transfer orbit allowed a payload triple feature to be deployed. Intelsat's Galaxy 30 and Japanese operator BSAT's BSAT-4B commsats are now set to move into their respective orbital positions, both providing a boost in bandwidth to their respective regions of North America and Asia. In addition, Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle-2 was also deployed, which will now rendezvous with Intelsat 10-02 in early 2021, attach itself, and provide five years of additional service life to a satellite with a nearly empty fuel tank. With the Ariane 6 on the horizon, there are now only eight more Ariane flights left. And here are your upcoming launches. And now for your space weather, here's Dr. Tametha Scope. Space weather this week is definitely calming down, especially from the series of solar storms that were launched last week. As we switch to our front-side sun, you can see the culprit, region 2771, pow, right there. That's firing an Earth-directed solar storm that was actually one of several that it fired. Now luckily, this storm ended up going east and south of Earth, so it really missed us. It was pretty much a fizzle at Earth. But one of the ones it also fired actually hit the STEREO-A spacecraft, which is just east of Earth. And oh my goodness, it was a beautiful specimen. So if one of these had actually not been a fizzle and actually hit Earth, we could have gotten to a G2-level storm very quickly. And it could have actually caught some issues for that Starlink constellation that just got launched. Here's a nice little treat. While we were waiting for that partly Earth-directed solar storm to arrive on August 19th, astronauts aboard the ISS got a glimpse of something special. Amid the weak aurora caused by disturbed solar wind ahead of the strong storm that ultimately missed us, Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner caught something unexpected. Did you see them? For just a moment, five bright lights appear in the distance, just above the airglow, right before the aurora rolls into view. But don't blink, or you'll miss them. These space guests, as Vagner has affectionately called them, have definitely raised eyebrows on social media. Called everything from aliens to meteors, these guests are likely not guests at all, but rather five of the newest members of the Starlink constellation. Considering the latest launch of 58 more Starlink satellites was completed just the day before, this is the most likely culprit. Of course, official word from Roscosmos on what the guests truly are is forthcoming. However, this is not the first time Starlink satellites have photobombed aurora pictures from the ISS. Back on April 13th, another sighting of a Starlink train was discovered by Ricardo Rossi. Once again, we see a long line of satellites just skimming the top of the auroral region. But thanks to Dr. Marco Langbroek, the guests in that photo have been successfully doxed. But just as the shots back in April, the recent sighting really illustrates how closely these low-Earth orbiting satellites come to the aurora. In fact, many of these satellites pass right through the electric current systems that feed the aurora. One only needs to look for the columns of light, often seen extending like fingers upwards into space at the top of the aurora, as evidence of these current systems. But these systems are hazardous sources of surface charging for these low-flying satellites, and during a big solar storm, these currents get much bigger, much stronger, and the atmosphere you see lighting up puffs out to higher altitudes. So while the recent anticipated solar storm may have missed us, these pictures are a reminder of the kind of tests these low-Earth orbiting satellites must yet endure. Because the new solar cycle is definitely ramping up, and the next decent-sized solar storm headed towards Earth, it may not be a near miss. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see aurora, and how it might actually affect the space traffic, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. It's been a bit of time since we've had one, so let's go ahead and jump into a bunch of little stories for a spaceflight yeehaw bonanza Jared's really wanting Tory Bruno's cowboy hat construction hard hat thing he has. All three spacecraft currently en route to Mars are healthy and operating as planned. The Hope orbiter from the United Arab Emirates, the Tianwen-1 orbiter-lander rover Super Mission from China, and NASA's Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter all successfully performed their first trajectory correction maneuvers. TransMars injection aims the vehicles just a tad away from Mars so that the upper stages of the rockets, which are not cleaned for contamination, have a minimal chance of impacting Mars. And this first in a set of trajectory correction maneuvers gets the vehicles on track for entering into orbit and entry descent landing when they arrive at Mars in February 2021. The X-37B team has won the 2019 Collier Trophy, considered by many to be the highest award you can win in aerospace. The National Aeronautics Association noted the design, development, and most importantly the operation of the X-37B as a reusable vehicle and platform for payloads as their deciding factor. There are two of the many shuttles that are used by the United States Air Force, with five missions having flown so far. That last one was a record time on orbit, 718 days. A sixth mission was launched in May, of course we don't know when it's going to be coming back, but one thing that we do know is that the X-37B program is not going to be a part of the United States Space Force, it's going to stay as a program operated by the U.S. Air Force. Now as was the case with the launch in May, the U.S. Space Force is still going to oversee launch activities for the X-37B. One of the largest radio telescopes in the world, the Arecibo Observatory, has suffered considerable damage due to the failure of a support cable which collapsed, generating a 30 meter gash in the dish, while also damaging the receiver above. Puerto Rico has taken a considerable wallop of natural disasters over the past few years, including strong hurricanes and earthquakes, which Arecibo was still working through some repairs from those. The National Science Foundation, which provides the majority of funds for Arecibo's operations, has said that the repairs for the new damage will likely take at least several months. And to wrap up this week's Tomorrow News, I just want to thank all of you who helped contribute to the shows of tomorrow. Without you citizens, we are not able to do this show. Yes, we cannot come to you from my garage. We cannot have folks like Ryan and Dr. Scove on to tell us all of the cool things. And we can't get all of this amazing space stuff out into the universe for everyone to enjoy without you. So we are forever indebted to you and what you have given us. And if you would like to help contribute to the shows of tomorrow and become a citizen, you can head on over to youtube.com slash TMRO slash join and take a look at some of those levels. There's one where in our discord server, we have a special room for our escape velocity members and they get to see all of the bad jokes that myself and Jamie and a whole bunch of other people sling constantly. And that's Tico eight for this edition of Tomorrow News. Thank you so much for watching us. And remember until the next one, stay safe, stay healthy and keep exploring. It's getting moistened here. Stop it. I'm trying to work. I'm going to be talking about the Pentagon throwing some dollars. Those did not separate. Well, here, let me see. Let me see if doing it like this can do it. And the Pentagon's throwing money. See, that works. That works much better. It's just the cleanup time is a lot longer. It's not a lot of money either, because I'm a millennial. Should you get my my fake ruble and throw that in there to really confuse, really confuse the system that they use to analyze everything? Got a whole bunch of American money in a fake Chinese ruble. What? How did I get a fake Chinese ruble? Don't ask.