The Atlas V rocket left Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Sunday.
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Orbital ATK used another company’s rocket to make this shipment.
With six astronauts on board, the space station has dipped below NASA’s desired six-month food supply.
Following two scrubs and a three day due to intense and wide spread rain squalls and excessive blustery winds, the third time is hopefully the charm for the Orbital ATK Cygnus resupply ship set for blastoff atop the venerable ULA Atlas V booster.
The commercial spacecraft that’s supposed to deliver equipment and supplies to astronauts aboard the ISS launched successfully Sunday at 4:44 p.m. ET and is expected to arrive Wednesday Dec. 9. Vern Thorp, program manager for NASA missions at ULA, said in a pre-launch interview on NASA TV that ULA switched from automated to manual monitoring of wind conditions, and when it monitored wind conditions, to avoid triggering a hold by a wind gust that did not pose an actual hazard to the launch.
The headsets and other supplies were supposed to be sent up on a SpaceX resupply mission in June – but that mission failed when a faulty support strut broke loose on the Falcon 9 rocket, causing a catastrophic breakup. The station typically stocks about six months of provisions, and two different craft, one from Japan and one from Europe, have docked in the meantime and brought some supplies.
It was followed eight months later by a SpaceX rocket explosion, and the consecutive accidents effectively shut off the flow of USA supplies to astronauts in orbit.
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. 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.
NASA has stressed station personnel were not suffering because of the supply interruptions.
This is the first time that the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V has served the space station. Boeing plans to use the Atlas V to launch its commercial crew spacecraft for NASA, the Starliner, as early as 2017.
The Cygnus launched Sunday is named after Mercury 7 astronaut Deke Slayton, a pioneer in commercial spaceflight before his death in 1993. Next stop: “@Space_Station”, Orbital ATK tweeted.
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The Atlas lifted off for the 60th time since its debut in 2002, flying ULA’s 12th and final mission of 2015, all successes.
