Vulcan Wins and Virgin Galactic has a new home | SPACE NEWS

Hello citizens of Earth, it's me, Jared. Welcome to Station 204, and let's go ahead and get started with a triplet of launches that's happened this past week. Starting off in China at the Xiquan Launch Base, Zhilong 1, also known as Smart Dragon 1, had its maiden launch at 0411 Universal Time, August 17th. Developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a division of China's state-owned launch vehicle manufacturer, it carried three satellites successfully to a sun-synchronous orbit. A Long March 3B rocket carrying a communications satellite, ChinaSat-18, lifted off at 1203 Universal Time on August 19th from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. Current reports are indicating that the Long March 3B launch vehicle worked as intended, reaching a geosynchronous transfer orbit, but there may be a problem with ChinaSat-18 itself. As of the making of this week's Space News, no further information is presently available, but someone will say something on Weibo for sure. Just a few minutes later, on August 19th, at 1212 Universal Time, Electron's Lukma No Hands mission left Launch Complex 1 at the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Carrying four satellites for three customers, Black Sky, the United States Air Force's Space Command, and Unseen Labs. Insertion into low-Earth orbit and deployment of all payloads occurred as planned. And here are this week's upcoming departures. Sierra Nevada Corporation has been making steady progress on their Dream Chaser vehicle to send supplies to the International Space Station, and recently they signed a contract with a launch vehicle that still hasn't had its first flight. At least six launches have been booked for the mini-shuttle on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket, which is currently set to begin qualification testing. Sierra Nevada noted that they went to five different launch providers, but United Launch Alliance best fit their needs. With a lifting body design, Dream Chaser is only nine meters long, roughly a quarter the length of the Space Shuttle Orbiter, but at least three to four times cuter. It will launch on top of a rocket and then land on a runway like a space shuttle. It can deliver up to 5,500 kilograms of cargo to the International Space Station, and it has the ability to return 1,850 kilograms to a runway with a much gentler re-entry profile than the capsule for those experimental results that need it. Sierra Nevada has said all six of the currently contracted resupply and return flights will land at NASA's Space Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, and flights will begin as soon as Vulcan Centaur is ready, which is currently aiming for an April 2021 debut flight. And in another win for ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket, Astrobotic Technology announced that they've selected the aforementioned rocket to send its Peregrine Lunar lander to the moon in 2021 as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. This will occur on the debut launch of Vulcan Centaur. So it looks like after Jared got back from his vacation, only evil Jared survived. My name is Jamie Higginbotham. I am Benjamin's evil alter ego, and I wanted to talk to you today about Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America. Virgin offered us some rare peeks inside of the spaceport to see what it would be like as citizen astronauts await their flights. Now, as you'd expect, the area is expansive and beautiful and dripping of that clean, futuristic vibe that we generally like here on Tomorrow. More than just a terminal for astronauts, Spaceport America also houses Virgin Galactic's Mission Control Center that will be the operations hub for their flights. The facility has all of the required ground support equipment for both the carrier aircraft and the spaceship itself, and of course hangar space for everything too. It's getting pretty exciting because it feels like Virgin Galactic passenger flights are imminent. But they are pretty far behind their original schedule, and that's had some not-so-great consequences for the spaceport. Spaceport America was officially declared open on October 18, 2011 at a pretty hefty cost to the taxpayers. With Virgin Galactic not taking up full residency right away, the spaceport's revenue has fallen well below projections for years now, much to the angst of the local New Mexican residents. In June of 2015, a visitor center was opened in Truth or Consequences, which is a number of kilometers away from the spaceport itself. Tourists would bus from the visitor center over to the spaceport, where they get a multi-hour tour. But missing from that tour was basically the Virgin Galactic wing of the spaceport, one of the primary reasons you'd probably want to go. Well, it was missing until now. As of this month, nearly eight years after the spaceport originally opened, Virgin Galactic is finally moving into what they call operational readiness. This means that their wing of the spaceport is nearly ready for passengers, they're starting to accept their vehicles on site, and soon, I expect we'll start to see flights to space and operational testing from their new home. Yep, it's been a long and difficult path, and not everything has gone to plan, but it feels like Virgin Galactic is getting pretty close to being able to fly actual paying customers very soon. And sure, the tickets still cost quite a bit of money, but we're on the cusp of something great here. We're about to enter a time where weekly or maybe even daily flights to space are a normal thing, and that's just pretty freaking cool. And speaking of taking up residency, let's also talk about NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building over on the East Coast. The VAB, or Vehicle Assembly Building, is one of the largest buildings in the world by volume. The doors are nearly 139 meters tall and take over 45 minutes just to open. It's so massive, it can have its own weather with rain clouds forming inside the building below the ceiling on humid days. Completed in 1966, it was originally designed to help assemble NASA's mighty Saturn V rocket that took humans to the moon. Then, after the Apollo program, the VAB was repurposed for Shuttle, and now part of the VAB is being repurposed for Space Launch System, or SLS. But NASA doesn't need all four of the massive high bays that are inside the VAB anymore, even with them bringing SLS online. So what do they do with the unused space, those extra high bays? Northrop Grumman has become the first commercial tenant of the VAB and will be assembling their Omega rocket inside of High Bay 2. On August 16th, there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the partnership between NASA, the Air Force, and Alliant Tech Systems Orbital Sciences Corporation, a space innovation systems division of Northrop Grumman. That, by the way, is an aerospace company's merger joke, and I thought it was pretty funny. Northrop Grumman will also be modifying Mobile Launcher Platform 3, or MLP3, which is the thing they will assemble the rocket on top of while it's in the VAB, then roll out and launch from their pad. Okay, so this is pretty cool, and I'm really excited that we're finding new uses for these really historic buildings. But I am a little bit curious about operations. Both the Space Launch System and Omega use a great amount of solid propellant, and that means that there will need to be hazardous operations inside of their high bays. Will they be able to both be in their unique high bays at the same time, performing hazmats on different rockets? Or is there going to be some sort of weird logistical nightmare between having the Space Launch System in one of the high bays and the Omega rocket in another high bay? Not entirely sure. Time will tell how those logistics play out, but it's still pretty cool that we're getting new uses for these old buildings. And now to hear about the latest happenings for the winds in our inner solar system, here's Dr. Tamitha Sko. Space weather this week continues to be a bit on the quiet side. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see the disc continues to be completely spotless. This means amateur radio operators and emergency responders, the solar flux continues to be low, so radio propagation on Earth's day side is going to also be poor. We also don't have anything rotating in through the Earth's strike zone this week, so we don't have any storms on the way. However, if you look at the east limb of the sun, you do see that dark coronal hole, and that is beginning to rotate into Earth view. It's actually one of two coronal holes. As we switch to our back side sun, well, our partial back side sun with stereo, you can see the two sets of coronal holes right there. This is the pair of coronal holes that last rotation gave us a nice size solar storm and brought aurora clear down to Colorado. So aurora photographers, get ready, because you've got about two weeks, maybe a little bit less, to get your batteries charged. And now for your Leo, Mio, Geo orbit outlook. As we switch to our low energy space environment, these are the particles that can cause surface charging on the outside of spacecraft, including charging up the solar arrays that then can cause electrical discharges. We are getting a few injections of flux right around the outside of the Geo orbits. This has been due to the fast solar wind that we've had over the last few days. It's not been all that fast, so the injections have been pretty minor. So you satellite operators, especially around Geo, you could get some intermittent issues with surface charging, but most likely the effects are going to be pretty minimal. Now, as we switch to the higher energy environment, these are the particles that have more energy to penetrate much more deeply into spacecraft electronics. We originally did have a bit of a buildup just outside of the Mio orbits, but that got flushed with the fast solar wind that hit, and now we're slowly beginning to build that flux back up again. But it's not really doing all that well. So it looks like over the next few days, you satellite operators, especially inside of and in Mio orbits and even at Leo orbits, it looks like things are going to be pretty good and you're pretty much in the clear. For more details on this week's space weather, including your GPS reception, emergency radio, and aurora predictions, check out my channel or come see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. We will be having a live Tomorrow Space Show this week on Saturday at 1800 UTC. And you're going to want to tune in because we've got something really cool on. Kathy Lurini will be our guest. She's the president of OCEAR Space Consulting Group, and she worked at NASA for 36 years. She led the development of the Global Exploration Roadmap. This is something that space agencies participating in the International Space Exploration Coordination Group came up with. And it's about as close as you can get to having a global space agency. If you've got any questions for Kathy, go ahead and leave them in the comments section below. And don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell. That way when we go live, you can know when it's happening and you can tune in and see it for yourself. And of course, a huge shout out to all of our patrons of Tomorrow. You folks help make this show happen. We wouldn't be able to do any of this without you. And it's so cool that we get to talk about all of this news every week and send it out to anyone who wants to watch it. So if you'd like to help us out here at Tomorrow, you can head on over to patreon.com or even go to youtube.com and you can give as little as $1 a month. Thanks for watching, everybody. And until the next Space News, keep exploring.