Air Force meteorologists anticipate a 60 percent chance of acceptable weather during Thursday’s 30-minute window at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 41, and the same odds if the launch should slip to Friday.
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In a bid to resume NASA’s commercial supply efforts to the orbiting worldwide laboratory, the first flight of Orbital ATK’s enhanced Cygnus spacecraft will carry more than 7,000 pounds of equipment and experiments to the global Space Station (ISS).
Meanwhile, NASA itself has already stated that there are concerns about Orbital getting back to the launchpad so quickly. The last one, on October 28, 2014, blew up seconds after launch, destroying the Cygnus and supplies.
Vascular Echo – Previous Canadian Space Agency supported research has shown that some astronauts experience accelerated arterial stiffening while in space. The Antares is expected to return to flight by next summer.
“The first thing we determined was that Antares was going to get a different engine”.
The mission is Orbital ATK’s fourth under a NASA contract worth more than $2 billion to resupply the ISS.
16, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren activated an experiment to test whether flowering plants can grow in space. Thus, their time on the International Space Station is an opportunity to explore the underlying mechanisms in order to design interventions that will slow vascular aging of the astronauts and improve health and quality of life on Earth.
For NASA and the commercial space industry, there is more than just cargo riding on the Atlas V rocket, which has a ideal record of 60 successful launches.
The OA-4 mission represents ULA’s first ISS Cargo Resupply mission.
Both NASA astronauts celebrated Thanksgiving on board ISS. The Cygnus and its trash will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere in a couple of months. It also marks ULA’s first mission supporting ISS cargo resupply. The Orbital explosion might not have been such a huge deal except that it was followed by another mishap the following June when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 disintegrated over Florida.
The International Space Station is about to get a little homier, thanks to a flower garden that should bloom in early 2016.
Researchers hope the flowers’ growth cycle, which is double the cycle of the lettuce grown previously, will provide good data about long-duration seed stow and germination as well as whether pollen would be a problem in the space station, officials said in the statement.
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“Growing a flowering crop is more challenging than growing a vegetative crop such as lettuce”, Gioia Massa, Kennedy Space Center payload scientist for Veggie, said in the same statement.
