The Orbital ATK built unmanned Cygnus cargo spacecraft will take off on Friday at 5:33 pm from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station of Florida, NASA officials announced.
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Clouds and showers at Cape Canaveral, Florida, kept the Atlas from launching when the 30-minute window opened at 5:55 p.m. Eastern time.
The next launch attempt is Saturday, although forecasters put the odds of acceptable conditions at a lowly 30 percent.
Orbital ATK is one of two commercial spaceflight companies with contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station for NASA.
This launch includes another first- the Atlas V rocket will be lifting the Cygnus into orbit.
A successful launch would restart the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s effort to commercialize resupply missions to the ISS.
Atlas V and Cygnus on the pad at night An Atlas V rocket, carrying the ISS-bound Cygnus resupply spacecraft, sits on the pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41. Last year, Orbital’ Antares rocket exploded just seconds into its launch to the ISS.
Investigators blamed the botched launch on a defective turbopump in one of Antares’ two main engines which was a refurbished Soviet-era motor constructed by Aerojet.
It will be America’s first supply mission to the space station since a rocket launched by NASA’s other cargo-hauling contractor, SpaceX, disintegrated soon after liftoff on June 28.
Then the USA cargo mission would have to work around a busy period of traffic by Russian crew and cargo vehicles flying to and from the outpost over the next several weeks.
NASA’s space station program manager, Kirk Shireman, said earlier this week that without another delivery, the six astronauts’ food would run out in April.
Orbital ATK’ Cygnus was scrubbed yesterday (December 3) due to inclement weather.
The other private company hired by NASA to deliver supplies, SpaceX, also remains stuck on Earth, at least until next month. The two previous failures (plus the loss of Russian Progress supply ship last April) means the ISS only has enough food to last until the spring.
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The company expects to start using its own Antares rocket again in May 2016. The dark horse in this race is Sierra Nevada, still hoping its cargo ship, DreamChaser, will be enough to persuade NASA to award it the contract, but the company doesn’t have any upcoming missions scheduled before decision time is up.
