SpaceX Splashes A Hop | TMRO:News

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Tomorrow News. So glad to have you here. We've got Ryan, who's going to be talking a little bit about SpaceX, hopping around. I'm going to be discussing commercial crew at NASA and some things that may not be settled quite just yet. And we've got our weekly space weather with Dr. Tamitha Scove. And 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, hit the notification bell, like this video and share it everywhere you can, because every little bit helps in getting us in front of folks in order to tell everybody about the universe and everything that's happening in it. So let's go ahead and get started with your Tomorrow News for August 7th, 2020. And Ryan, let's go ahead and get hopping. The home. Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken both splashed down at exactly 18.48 and six seconds coordinated universal time on the 2nd of August, ending their historic two month long mission to the International Space Station, to which it was docked to for over 63 days and nine hours. NASA astronauts Bob and Doug, on behalf of the SpaceX and NASA teams, welcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. It should also be noted that a number of private boats were around Dragon at this time, which could have led to some less than ideal situations, as because of Dragon's hypergolic fuels, a lot of people could have been exposed to hazardous chemicals. This has then led to the Coast Guard releasing a statement on the whole ordeal, who has said that the development of lessons learned will be our priority moving forward. I wonder exactly how long it will take for the next crew to fly SpaceX, because SpaceX and NASA have said no earlier than late September, but we just want a date. This is an enormous accomplishment for the entire SpaceX team and commercial crew program, and for the first time in history, a commercial entity has designed, manufactured, launched and landed their own spacecraft with humans inside, and at the same time, everything launched apart from the second stage and the trunk has been completely recovered. Amazing. And the other reusable vehicle that SpaceX are currently developing, Starship, has just completed a static fire in the form of its SN5 version. The Raptor fired for only a couple seconds, but oh my, it does sound powerful. The old fins that were attached to the Mark 1 Starship vehicle has just been picked up and worked on, as they could be used on an SN5 or any other future generation of Starship. As well as a static fire, SN5 has also gone slightly further. Firing its single Raptor engine, the 9 metre wide stainless steel pipe made its way up to 150 metres, whilst translating itself over towards the ocean. On its way back down, you can see the little landing legs flipping out just in time for its smooth touchdown. This comes after a year of waiting between flights in Boca Chica, so let's hope the next one comes a little bit quicker. The different sections of serial number 8 are also coming together as construction of SN8 is getting well underway in the southern Texas settlement. Thanks Ryan. It's been about a month since an anomaly on board of a Rocket Lab Electron ended its flight on July 4th, and the company says that they now have found the root of the problem. Unlike most rockets, Electron uses battery-powered, electrically driven turbo pumps to move fuel and oxidizer into its Rutherford engines. Five and a half minutes into ascent, an electrical connector that supplied power from the battery to the turbo pumps of Electron's second stage engine disconnected. That killed the power and caused a premature shutdown of the engine. Having not yet achieved orbital velocity, the second stage, along with its seven-satellite payload, peaked at 195 kilometres, then re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke apart, likely burning up before it hit the ocean. There were 25,000 channels of telemetry coming from the Electron rocket, and it continued to downlink all of that even after the premature engine shutdown. So that actually allowed engineers at Rocket Lab to zero in on the problem very, very quickly and figure out what was the next step to take. Pre-flight testing procedures did not catch the problem that caused the electrical connector to disconnect. Material that helps secure the connector from vibration also did not secure it from vibration. And there was also a higher resistance at one of the connector's joints, and higher resistance generates more heat, and those high temperatures finally did the connector in. Now, Rocket Lab was able to recreate the issue on the ground because of all the great data that they had. So now the engineers know precisely what to look for during the pre-flight checks to make sure that this doesn't happen again. And Rocket Lab is looking at doing its return-to-flight mission sometime this month, and next month in September, they're looking at doing their first mission out of Wallops Island in Virginia. In a nice surprise, Rocket Lab announced that thanks to newer battery technologies delivering improved performance, their Electron rocket is now capable of lifting more to orbit. Originally putting 150 kilograms into a 500 kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, Electron is now capable of a solid 200 kilograms to sun-synchronous, and improves from 225 kilograms in lower orbits to a hefty 300 kilograms of payload into those orbits. Now, Rocket Lab wasn't the only company dealing with an anomaly. Virgin Orbit's Launcher One in its first test flight really didn't run very long, but there was a lot of data gathered during that test, and a lot of success. And on May 25th, Virgin Orbit conducted the first test flight of their Launcher One rocket, successfully deploying it from their 747 Cosmic Girl. Engine ignition went smoothly, but shortly after, a high-pressure feed line broke. The engine was starved of liquid oxygen and shut down. As per safety rules, the Launcher One's flight was terminated. But Virgin Orbit noted that their countdown went smoothly, that their work in determining the aerodynamics, interactions, and control systems was verified as accurately modeled, that the Newton-3 main engine ignited, and that the rocket began its planned trajectory. The company already has a second Launcher One vehicle going through integration, and they expect one more test flight before the end of 2020, so hopefully they have some good success then. And Virgin Orbit isn't the only part of the Virgin brand that's undergoing test flights at the moment. Virgin Galactic is about to start a campaign of its own. Thanks to delays from the COVID-19 pandemic, Virgin Galactic now says that the first commercial flights for their Spaceship Two suborbital spaceplane will begin in 2021, which is about six months out. Two powered test flights, the first from Spaceport America in New Mexico, will be conducted. The first of those test flights will have two pilots, along with payloads from NASA's Flight Opportunities Program. The second test flight will be much more ambitious, two pilots and four mission specialists, whose job it will be to evaluate the newly unveiled customer cabin inside of Spaceship Two. Gosh, I mean, I really want to take a ride on a rocket to space as a part of my job. If all goes well, a third powered test flight will occur in early 2021, and that will have Sir Richard Branson aboard. I do wonder, though, who will be on that fourth powered flight? Would you take that ride? Would you put something on that ride, like a memento or an experiment that you'd want to fly? Personally, I'd put myself there. It sounds like a really good adventure if you ask me. Let me know what you'd do in the comments below. Gosh, there's been a lot of test flights, hasn't there? You know, Crew Dragon Endeavor, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Boeing Starliner, and yeah, Starliner. Remember that? Yeah, it's back. And yeah, we're going to be talking safety about it again. It just seems to be a never-ending stream of bad news for Boeing's capsule. There's almost always a now what and how much more is it going to cost dread sweeping across whenever I hear Starliner uttered, and NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel has both praise and grievances. In a report released by the panel, they note that Boeing has made real tangible progress in fixing Starliner's issues, but that lingering concerns regarding quality control are still present. One example was the parachute failure that occurred during last year's successful Starliner pad abort test. Its cause was traced to a missing pin. A missing pin. Of all things. Geez. Now, even though Boeing was decidedly the focus of that report, SpaceX did not exactly get out of it scot-free. I mean, they got their feet held to the fire a little bit. It was only just a few weeks ago that NASA announced a reversal of their decision on SpaceX's Crew Dragon operations, saying that they would now allow for reuse of Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 Stage 1s for commercial crew flights. The panel noted that NASA would now have to adapt their human certification requirements for this and for SpaceX's philosophy of incremental upgrades to vehicles, meaning safety-related processes that require a large amount of time, budget, and oversight could be strained. Consider it a word of advice from the panel to NASA, that the agency should make sure that it is prepared to take on the consequences of what these changes entail across the board. I do genuinely hope to start hearing more positive updates coming out of Boeing and in addition to that, some details from NASA about their reuse with SpaceX. And there are some updates that I bet you're particularly interested in, and it would be our launches in this week's Space Traffic. Lifting off on July 30th at 11.50 UTC from SLC-41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA's next Mars rover, Perseverance, and the first Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, left Earth for good with the help of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V in the 5-4-1 configuration, meaning the Atlas V was flown with a 5-meter payload fairing, four solid strap-on motors attached to the first stage, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage. Around 20 minutes before launch, a magnitude 4.2 earthquake occurred here in the Southern California region. I felt it sitting and watching the launch coverage, as did the folks at Perseverance's Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. But that's not a particularly large earthquake, so all went ahead as planned. A picture-perfect launch saw the rover and its crew stage released after a second burn put it on course for Mars at 11 kilometers a second. But almost immediately after separation from the Centaur upper stage, Perseverance snapped into safe mode. It took roughly a day to coax Perseverance back out to regular operations, and no harm had occurred. Engineers suspect that the deployment of Perseverance in the shadow of the Earth caused it to cool to a temperature low enough to trip into safe mode. The radio transmitters on board of Perseverance also momentarily overwhelmed the Deep Space Network's antennas, literally too loud. But ground teams resolved the issue, and Perseverance, with ingenuity, are now the third and final mission on the way to Mars. And if you'd like to know more about the two previously launched missions, check out last week's Tomorrow News. Popping over to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, later that day at 2125 UT, a Russian Proton rocket leapt up above Site 200 and roared into the clouds to deliver two Russian communication satellites, Express-80 and Express-103. Several burns over 18 hours conducted by the Breeze-M upper stage led to a successful deployment, where the two express satellites will be used for TV and mobile communications, high-speed internet and data transmission. And here are your upcoming launches. And for this week's space weather, here's Dr. Tanitha Scove. Space weather this week is definitely beginning to pick up, and all of the news is in the Northern Hemisphere. As we switch to our front-side sun, we have a coronal hole in the north that's rotating in through the Earth's strike zone. It's been sending us some fast solar wind over the past 24 hours, and it's even brought aurora down to mid-latitudes. And it could easily continue to do that over the next 24 hours. On top of that, we also have a coronal hole, a smaller one that's more equatorial that will also rotate into the Earth's strike zone here in the next three or four days, so we could easily be having unsettled to disturbed conditions in through, I don't know, the end of the week or so before things settle down. But believe it or not, that's not even the biggest story. Have you looked at the Northern Hemisphere and the bright lights you see there? Look at that. Bam, bam, bam. Can you say hello, Solar Cycle 25? These are all Solar Cycle 25 sunspots. They're at high latitudes, and every single one of these regions have been numbered, including the latest region, that's region 2770. Now as we switch to our far-sighted sun, this is stereo A, and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side. You can see those three regions far better in this view. And that last region, that one has been firing off some B-class flares, so it's not a lot of radio noise. It wasn't enough to cause any issues for the dragon splash down the other day, just in case you wondered that. Thank goodness things are still quiet, but I'm telling you, we're going to start seeing things pick up here pretty soon. On top of that, look at the bright region rotating into stereo's view in the south. Yet another Solar Cycle 25 bright region. So how can we say Solar Cycle 25 is finally beginning to ramp up? It's here, and right now we're dealing with pretty quiet space comms for space traffic, but you never know, we're going to have to start really being on our toes. For more details on this week's space weather, including how those bright regions will affect dayside radio communications, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Now the upcoming Ariane 5 launch that you saw on our Earth Departures Board, it's going to be more than just a simple chuck your commsats into the proper transfer orbit. No, they're actually going to be doing some pretty big tests in order to make sure that when the James Webb Space Telescope flies on the Ariane 5, everything goes according to plan. The James Webb Space Telescope is a delicate yet massive behemoth of a spacecraft. The Ariane 5 is a potent heavy launch vehicle, and the only one with a payload fairing large enough to fit an already origami folded J-Dub inside of it. Making sure J-Dub makes it to space safely is the priority, and a new payload fairing is being tested to assure that that happens. NASA had concerns about the potential buildup of air between the thin sheets of silver Kapton that will help shield the telescope from the sun, keeping it ultra-cold, and that buildup of air could rip the Kapton when the payload fairing deploys. So they've got to manage the removal of air pressure in a way that keeps those layers of Kapton intact. Earlier this year, the Ariane 5 flew with a modified payload fairing containing vents that allowed for improvement with the air pressure inside, and this upcoming launch will see larger vents used. In addition, a new vehicle equipment bay will be employed with this upcoming launch. Its lighter weight will actually help increase the Ariane 5's payload capacity by 85 kilograms. We've also got a test of a base system for autonomous flight termination. And to wrap up this week's Tomorrow News, I want to thank all of you citizens who helped contribute to the shows here at Tomorrow. I always say that we are truly appreciative of all of our citizens of Tomorrow, and that sentiment is held by every single one of us who are on this channel. You help make all of this possible. Without you, we don't have the ability to take the time to make these shows, we don't have the equipment, we don't have the ability to get it to you. So we are forever appreciative that you citizens have contributed to help make the shows of Tomorrow possible. And if you're interested in joining in with your fellow citizens of Tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join, and check out all of the levels and rewards that you can get. And that's Seiko 9 for this edition of Tomorrow News. Thank you so much for joining us, and until the next one, remember, stay safe, stay healthy, and keep exploring!