The Orbital ATK launch originally was scheduled for Thursday evening, but rain and heavy cloud cover forced postponement.
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In this photo provided by the United Launch Alliance, an Atlas V rocket carrying the Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, is rolled from the Vertical Integration Facility to a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015.
Watch live, via the embedded feed above, starting at 4:30 p.m. EST today, Thursday, December 3, as NASA TV presents the next cargo launch to the ISS.
The Cygnus, an upgraded cargo ship, is due to carry more than 7,700 pounds (3,500 kg) of food, clothing, supplies and science experiments to the space station, including a prototype satellite astronauts will put together like a Lego kit.
60 per cent chance of favourable weather during the launch window.
The writing had been on the wall as soon as the weather briefing had been conducted however, with the weather officer stating that even the prediction of weather conditions providing only a 10 percent chance of favorable conditions for launch as being “optimistic”.
The Atlas V rocket has proved consistently reliable since its maiden launch in 2002, suffering only one significant issue in 2007 when a valve leak in the upper stage caused it to shut down early. In October 2014, Antares rocket exploded a few seconds after the liftoff. Orbital ATK bought another company’s rocket, the veteran Atlas V, for this supply mission. It was the company’s first failure since making the first commercial space station shipment in 2012. The other is SpaceX, which has a $1.6 billion contract to fly 12 missions for NASA using Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rockets. It had the last USA resupply success, back in April. A Russian cargo spacecraft had also failed to launch in April 2015.
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The Deke Slayton II is the first ISS-bound spacecraft that had been previously worked on inside the space station.
