After several days of delay due to bad weather, Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft successfully lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida yesterday (December 6, 2015), loaded with vital cargo to resupply the International Space Station.
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Orbital has a $1.9 billion contract with NASA to supply astronauts at the orbiting outpost but has not sent any cargo in more than a year because of an Antares rocket explosion in October 2014 that destroyed its cargo ship and the thousands of pounds of supplies on board.
There have been three failed attempts since Thursday last week and after launch windows delayed on Thursday and Friday, launch directors and managers have only been anticipating a 20 percent chance of good weather conditions and made a decision to stop the countdown three hours before the countdown on Saturday before fueling the Atlas V rocket of United Launch Alliance.
The company is still redesigning the Antares rocket and it won’t be ready for months yet, so instead, Orbital Sciences will be using the tried-and-tested Atlas V delivery system instead, at no extra cost to NASA.
SpaceX – also part of NASA’s commercial crew effort – aims to restart station deliveries in January with its Falcon rockets.
Supplies at the station are running low due to several failed delivery runs and botched rocket launches.
The capsule carries more than 3,500kg (7,700lb) of food, clothing, computer gear, spacewalk equipment, science experiments and other supplies.
Cygnus is expected to reach the International Space Station by Wednesday and will remain attached for up to 60 days.
Under the CRS contract with NASA, Orbital ATK will deliver approximately 62,000 pounds (28,000 kilograms) of cargo to the ISS over 10 missions through early 2018.
In addition, this flight marked the 25th successful flight of the Orbital ATK retro motors on the Atlas V, eight of which provided thrust for separation of the spent first stage.
It was the company’s first failure since making the first commercial space station shipment in 2012.
“This launch begins a high tempo of cargo resupply missions supporting the International Space Station”, said Culbertson.
Orbital ATK is one of two private space companies NASA hired to service the space station. The space station remains the springboard to NASA’s next great leap in exploration, including future missions to an asteroid and Mars. Boeing intends to use the Atlas V to boost the Starliner capsules it’s building to ferry astronauts to the space station beginning in 2017.
For the past six months NASA has relied on Russian and Japanese rockets to bring supplies to and from the space station.
2015 has been a hard year for the mission. NASA’s 30-year shuttle program proved expensive and complicated, and, on two flights, deadly.
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The Cygnus launched Sunday is named after Mercury 7 astronaut Deke Slayton, a pioneer in commercial spaceflight before his death in 1993.
