Fancy a cuppa, OneWeb? | TMRO:News

Hello citizens of Earth, this is tomorrow news and look we are back at station 204 for a little bit. Ah my gosh, oh it's so beautiful to be here. Now this week Ryan is going to be navigating through our SpaceX update. I have got a little bit of Britishness to bring to space along with some contracts and some slippage when it comes to Mars and we've got Dr. Tamitha Scove giving us our space weather. Now before we continue on just want to remind you of course if you like what we do don't forget to subscribe to us, share our videos everywhere that you can, hit that little like and hit the notifications so that way you can know when our videos are going to be coming out. So let's go ahead and get this started because this is your tomorrow news for the week of July 6th 2020 and Ryan let's do it, tell me everything. We're still waiting for Starlink 9. With three dates scratched off the calendar hopefully this upcoming one will be the one. It is planned for launch at 1400 coordinated universal time on July the 8th and I hope that the launch looks just as awesome as the last launch from SpaceX which successfully placed the GPS 3 Space Vehicle 3 satellite into orbit. Black Sky are going to be launching some of their satellites on the next Starlink mission as a part of SpaceX's rideshare program which has just gotten some brand new contracts. The German launch service provider ExoLaunch has announced a contract with SpaceX to integrate nanoavionics satellites onto some of SpaceX's rideshare missions. The agreement says that ExoLaunch will handle the integration of the satellites and also the deployment when they reach orbit of two six unit CubeSats. So instead of SpaceX deploying nanoavionics satellites ExoLaunch is basically doing it for them. Starship serial number five has successfully completed its cryo test reaching the very cold temperatures needed for the cryogenic fuels that it will be holding on board when getting ready for the 150 meter hop test. Because of this successful test Raptor engine number 27 has also been set for installation underneath the vehicle which will be able to propel this nine meter wide vehicle up into the sky. But when going long distances also known as flying into orbit the future iterations of Starship will need some help getting there in the form of the super heavy booster. Because of its immense height it requires its own building area which has been named the high bay which has to be constructed by this absolutely enormous crane nicknamed Brusilla. It boggles my mind with the immense scale of the rocketry components being worked on here which is really just goes to show the scale of the entire aerospace industry. You have hobbyists at home working on their model rockets and then you have SpaceX out here building a 70 meter tall booster which should definitely be able to finally go back upon orbit to station 204 where Jared is currently aboard. Thanks for the update Ryan. Now one of SpaceX's competitors Arianespace is actually inking a 1 billion euro deal with the European Union and last week we talked a little bit about the United Kingdom potentially bidding on OneWeb and trying to incorporate that into their assets that they have and now we could say that yes indeed they bought it. The Ariane 5 for all its heavy lift capabilities is a beast with numbered days. It's a product of an agreement made at the 1985 ministerial meeting in Rome with the European Space Agency member states when everyone knew that the 1990s was set to be rife with huge comsats needing big rockets to loft them constantly and of course history shows us that that didn't happen but the Ariane 5 is still a great especially reliable launcher but it's expensive and with new kids on the block like SpaceX and Blue Origin their answer is the upcoming Ariane 6. But innovation is more than just a buzzword these days it's a critical cog in the philosophy of an aerospace company that is either going to choose to thrive in the market that we currently have or is going to go extinct. That 1 billion euro deal which is just about 1.2 billion US dollars will help Ariane space move in what they think is the correct direction but there's also another sector of interest the private one. Here in the United States a definitive argument could be made that the seed money for the private spaceflight revolution that we're seeing right now was delivered by NASA in the early aughts with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. So what's going on in Europe? Terry Breton the current European commissioner for internal market is pushing for the European commission to increase their space budget 50%. That would be up to a solid 16 billion euros for 2021 to 2027 and very specifically earmark 1 billion euros of that funding to go squarely into European space startups. Now the European Union like all the cool kids right now is also looking at developing its own satellite internet constellation. That brings us to OneWeb which the United Kingdom just purchased a stake in and why are they doing that? Well it's a little bit of a gamble to help you navigate around your towns or your cities or villages or whatever you call it. It's it's to help you navigate. The story of OneWeb that's being written out in real time has been chaotic. This recent chapter of bankruptcy has been wild with the names of potential investors running around such as SpaceX, Amazon, Unistat, even Jared Head potentially purchasing OneWeb. But the United Kingdom's government has gone half in with India Telecom Bharti to purchase dropping 500 million dollars in the process for a winning billion dollar bid taking a 20% stake in the company. So why is the United Kingdom's government doing this? Brexit. Specifically because the United Kingdom withdrew from the Galileo Navigation Satellite System which is a European Union project. Obviously high speed low latency satellite internet is still in the works but a navigation system dedicated to United Kingdom's use seems to be going that way. So it's not just a show of seriousness in retaining an aerospace workforce manufacturing base and the potential for OneWeb sats to be built in the United Kingdom. It's multiple services to be provided from a single satellite constellation. There's just a slight problem which is that OneWeb's current satellite designs and orbits that they're going into would be tremendously difficult to work with to convert over to navigation. The U.S.'s GPS, Russia's GLONASS and China's beta systems are all in medium earth orbit. That's at about 19,000 kilometers above the earth. At this altitude you only need a few satellites to provide navigation services and they are visible in your sky for much longer. Where OneWeb satellites orbit at roughly 1,200 kilometers above you'll need at least a double digit number of satellites in your sky for accurate navigation and the lower altitude leaves them much more susceptible to jamming of their frequencies and the ever-growing threat of anti-satellite weapons. Not to mention that the OneWeb satellites aren't designed for navigation use so you'll have to work on a revised design and then there are the frequencies and the rights management of those frequencies and holy smokes there is a ton going on here. It's certainly left a lot of people in the industry scratching their heads quite deeply and maybe pulling out their hair a little bit but as the great Freddie Mercury once said you can do anything you'd like with my music but don't make it boring. So I guess the don't make it boring part is kind of what's happening with this light navigation system here. Coming back across the Atlantic NASA is preparing two contracts one for a launch of totaling up to 30 kilograms into a 500 kilometer orbit. The second looks like quite a doozy asking for a 95 kilogram payload of CubeSats to be placed into a 550 kilometer sun synchronous orbit. That's standard stuff but it's two sets of CubeSats. Constellation A will go into that standard orbit the Constellation B will have a minimum inclination change of 10 degrees. That is a bit of energy expenditure. A request for proposals will be coming soon and the launch of these payloads must occur before June 30th 2022. So if you've got something that can do these kinds of missions sitting in your garage time to get that bid ready. Following up another story that was talked about last week and has had some major changes to it the United States Department of Defense was handing out small sat launch contracts to six companies under the Defense Production Act and yeah they've withdrawn that. It was noted that those contracts were handed out without competition and if that occurs the United States Department of Defense needs what's called justification and approval to do so and they didn't. Whoopsies! Well see we'll see what this leads to and as it was roughly 115 million dollars in contracts that is not a small amount and likely would have been quite helpful to some of the companies that were selected. Not only does Ryan get to cover a launch I get to cover some as well. So let's go ahead and get space traffic going by starting in you guessed it China. On July 3rd at 0310 universal time a Long March 4B lifted off from the Tianan satellite launch center carrying the Gaofen multi-mode imaging satellite. Successfully reaching orbit Gaofen multi-mode will be used for resource geological and agricultural surveys mapping forestry and other uses with its onboard camera capable of generating images with a resolution down to one meter. A small multi-unit CubeSat known as BY-70-2 was also successfully deployed to test image and data transmission from space and promote the interests of youth in the space sciences. Lifting off from the incredibly beautiful launch complex one on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula a Rocket Lab Electron began its trip to space on July 4th at 2119 universal. This mission named PIX or It Didn't Happen aimed to deliver a payload of seven small satellites to a 500 kilometer orbit. All looked well in the ascent until 5 minutes 41 seconds when the video stream from the rocket froze and telemetry indicated near zero gain in velocity and altitude began to drop. Shortly after Rocket Lab confirmed a loss of vehicle event had occurred. The payloads aboard were flown by Canon Electronics, Planet and a British startup called InSpace Missions. Rocket Lab is currently investigating the failure. We here tomorrow entertain zero speculation from anyone so we'll keep you up to date when Rocket Lab themselves releases data. And here are your upcoming launches. And now for this week's space weather here's Dr. Tammeth Escott. Space weather this week is a bit of hit and miss. As we switch to our front side sun you can see we have had a finger-like coronal hole that's been rotating into the Earth's strike zone. It's been sending us a bit of fast wind and keeping us at disturbed conditions with the possibility of aurora. But it's pretty fleeting. It's not going to last all that long before things are quieting back down. Now on top of that we also have had some bright regions rotate into Earth view. This is including a new region. This is region 2766. It is a sunspot but it's an old cycle sunspot. These are the death rows of solar cycle 24. So we've been watching it very carefully and as this region has been emerging it actually helped to launch a filament kind of in the northwest quadrant and so we launched another solar storm but it is not Earth-directed thankfully so we are in the clear. Now as we switch to our far side sun this is stereo A's view and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side. You can see those bright regions as they rotate into Earth view. They've been kind of firing off some mini solar storms here and there including when you watch region 2766 kind of emerge in the middle of this you can actually see a poof and you can see that filament eruption that big solar storm that launched that wasn't Earth-directed. The sad thing though is that when you look past these regions there's really not much going on. The sun looks pretty quiet so once these regions rotate in through the Earth's strike zone then things will settle down and it may go back to quiet. And although we haven't had many views of aurora from solar storms as of late we still have had some gorgeous views of noctilucent clouds and of comet NEOWISE like this view from Austria and it was seen in Hungary. We saw views in Spain and down in Greece and we've had some gorgeous noctilucent clouds as well like these in the Netherlands and also the noctilucent cloud views have been all over Washington over the past week or so. And if you want to catch the comet NEOWISE there is still time so if you want to do it and you're in the northern hemisphere you need to look to the east northeast skies just before sunrise and you'll find the comet between the horizon and just below the star Capella. For more details on this week's space weather including more details on that old cycle sunspot and that solar storm launch come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. It's just a bit after the 4th of July here in the states but that does not mean that the fireworks are over because it's time for another Jared's call it what you want yeehaw bonanza spaceflight get on it let's talk about it right now. Starting off with some not so fun news NASA's Perseverance rover has seen its launch delayed once again this time due to off nominal data from a liquid oxygen sensor line on its Atlas 5 launch vehicle from a wet dress rehearsal in June. Now during this test the Atlas 5 is loaded with its propellants to see how well the systems handle fueling. This pushes the launch back now to July 30th eating 13 days into its launch window for Mars. This window was originally set to close on August 11th but NASA is seeing if they can actually push it out to August 15th with shorter daily launch windows. None of the issues delaying the launch thus far have come from Perseverance itself and as a note the Atlas 5 is the only launch vehicle in the United States arsenal that is certified to carry nuclear materials as Perseverance is powered by an RTG. Blue Origin has delivered their first BE-4 engine to United Launch Alliance which will be used in tandem to power the first stage of the upcoming Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle. This is a development and test engine not a flight qualified BE-4. Now the BE-4 is an oxygen rich staged combustion engine using liquid oxygen as its oxidizer and liquid natural gas as its fuel and will generate up to 550,000 pounds of thrust. United Launch Alliance is going to begin testing the engine shortly. Astronauts Chris Cassidy and Bob Behnken performed an extra vehicular activity on July 1st continuing battery replacement work on the outside of the International Space Station removing old nickel hydrogen batteries to replace with newer more efficient longer lasting lithium ion batteries. Spending six hours and one minute in the silent sea Cassidy and Behnken performed all scheduled tasks and diligently demolished a sizable chunk of what are known as get ahead tasks. Two more spacewalks by Chris Cassidy and Bob Behnken are scheduled towards the end of July which will wrap up a years-long upgrade of the station's batteries. And to wrap up this week's news I just want to It really means a lot to me and everybody who works on Tomorrow that you all contribute to make this possible. All this equipment that we use, the studio space that we have, station 204 itself, the time those of us involved in this can take to work on these shows, none of this is possible without you. Every single bit of support that you provide is greatly appreciated and if you'd like to help the shows of tomorrow head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join and check out all the levels and rewards that you can get and of course don't forget we got our discord server you could jump on there and kind of chat with us and schmooze around a bit and it's pretty fun and of course subscribing, liking our videos, setting up notifications, and sharing our videos everywhere that you can is another huge way for you to support us as well. And that's Seco 8 for this edition of Tomorrow News. Thank you so much for watching us and until the next one remember stay safe, stay healthy, and keep exploring. CubeSats totaling up to 30 kilograms into a 500 kilo 500 kilogram orbit man let me tell you that's some thinking oh shouldn't have said that name out loud and this is your damn it damn it damn it