Following a three-day delay caused due to bad weather, the unmanned Cygnus spacecraft blasted off from a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 4:44 pm EST on Sunday.
Advertisement
The rocket is delivering supplies to the International Space Station. Thanks to the capacities of the rocket and a super-sized Cygnus capsule, this is the heaviest Atlas 5 payload ever put into orbit, and the biggest US cargo shipment to the space station since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.
The launch marks Orbital’s fourth scheduled mission to the orbiting outpost, as a part of a Dollars 1.9 billion contract with NASA to ship requirements to the astronauts dwelling in space.
This mission marks the return to flight for Cygnus after the explosion of an Antares rocket in 2014 destroyed another Cygnus that was expected to bring cargo to the Space Station.
NASA hired Orbital ATK and Elon Musk’s SpaceX as private space companies to provide resupply missions to the ISS.
In a string of failed resupply cargo ship launches, the space station has been struggling to rebound from this series of unfortunate events.
The capsule – Cygnus – carries more than 3500kg of food, clothing, computer gear, spacewalk equipment, science experiments and other supplies.
Cygnus separated from its Atlas V booster about 21 minutes after launching into orbit. Russia, which also lost a shipment earlier this year, has another supply run coming up in two weeks.
While redesigning the Antares with different engines, Orbital ATK purchased two Cygnus launches on the Atlas V flown from Cape Canaveral by ULA, a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture. Today, the station has enough food and supplies to last until April, which is below the six month margin of NASA.
United Launch Alliance builds and flies the powerful Atlas V, a workhorse normally used to hoist satellites for the Air Force and others.
“We’ve been consuming some of our critical spares”, Kirk Shireman, NASA ISS program manager, said at a December 2 press conference at the Kennedy Space Center.
The Cygnus launched Sunday is named after Mercury 7 astronaut Deke Slayton, a pioneer in commercial spaceflight before his death in 1993.
Advertisement
The enhanced Cygnus spacecraft that launched today incorporated numerous planned upgrades of the vehicle including an extended pressurized cargo module (PCM), which enables the spacecraft to carry over 50 percent more cargo than the previous version.
