“As we celebrate Orbital ATK’s success with its fourth cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station, we look forward to the next milestones of our other commercial partners, including commercial crew launches from American soil in the near future”.
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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from launch complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Sunday, December 6, 2015, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. It’s also the first Cygnus mission using the Atlas V launch system.
SpaceX – also part of NASA’s commercial crew effort – aims to restart station deliveries in January with its Falcon rockets. It launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The U.S. shipment contains food, clothes, toiletries, spacewalking gear, science experiments and Christmas presents.
The spacecraft is expected to dock with the ISS on Wednesday.
It was the company’s first failure since making the first commercial space station shipment in 2012.
An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Florida on Sunday, sending a long-awaited Orbital ATK cargo ship on its way to the International Space Station for NASA.
The liftoff Sunday atop the Atlas V rocket went smoothly, with no flaws or problems after a launch delay of several days due to bad weather. Apart from the Antares Cygnus launch past year, a Russian Progress ship failed to communicate with its mothership and has fallen back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.
The rocket holds 7,400 pounds of supplies, all packed into a capsule named Cygnus after the swan constellation. The Cygnus is carrying more than 7,000 pounds of cargo.
The “S.S. Deke Slayton II” Cygnus spacecraft was successfully deployed into its intended orbit approximately 144 miles above the Earth, inclined at 51.6 degrees to the equator, according to Orbital ATK. Today, the station has enough food and supplies to last until April, which is below the six month margin of NASA.
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The rocket is delivering supplies to the International Space Station. The enhanced Cygnus also uses the latest in lightweight space-qualified electrical power technology with the addition of the company’s UltraFlex solar arrays which were manufactured at Orbital ATK’s Goleta, California facility. It will be the first NanoRacks microsatellite deployed from the space station and the first propulsion-capable satellite deployed from the NanoRacks-MicroSat-Deployer known as Kaber.
