The blaze is for scientific purposes only and won’t ignite until the unmanned craft is clear of the International Space Station at mission’s end in May.
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The station will receive investigations arriving on Orbital ATK’s fifth Nasa-contracted commercial resupply mission later this month.
An Atlas rocket will provide the ride.
The US Air Force is developing a US-made substitute for the Russian RD-180 booster, which it hopes to deploy by 2019.
US astronaut Jeff Williams, born in Superior and raised in Winter, Wis., and cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:26 p.m. EDT (2126 GMT) and reached the station at 11:09 p.m. EDT (0309 GMT).
This will be the second flight to the station of an enhanced Cygnus spacecraft, which has an extended pressurized cargo module that increases the spacecraft’s interior volume capacity by 25 percent and enables more cargo to be delivered with each mission.
Loaded on the Cygnus are a variety of experiments and related equipment for the station.
This new 3-D printer is an update to one launched to the space station in 2014. This new version of the printer can use about 30 different materials to create finalized 3D forms in space, but Cygnus is only launching with three types of plastic for the printer to use at this time.
There’s also a fire experiment that will remain on the Cygnus. Previous experiments studying fire’s behavior in space have been limited for safety reasons. Another onboard trial that will occur after Cygnus leaves the ISS is the Spacecraft Fire Experiment-I (Saffire-I) payload. Upon departure from the ISS, Cygnus will be placed into a specific orbit to utilize a CubeSat deployer provided by NanoRacks. The partnership is cultivating a robust American commercial space industry, freeing NASA to focus on developing the next-generation rocket and spacecraft that will enable humans to conduct deep space exploration missions. Cygnus will be launched into a targeted orbit of 144 miles above the Earth, inclined at 51.6 degrees to the equator.
Orbital-ATK is still recuperating from a catastrophe in October 2014 that sidelined its Antares rockets and left its Wallops Island, Virginia launchpad severely damaged.
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Aboard the space station already has an all-purpose exercise machine, but it’s too big to work in the cramped confines of a spacecraft heading toward Mars.
