Long-waited US supplies sent to ISS

This launch marked the 60th straight success for the venerable Atlas V, the first ever Atlas V rocket that hurled a commercial Cygnus cargo freighter to the International Space Station (ISS), and the “Return to Flight” for Cygnus.

Lift-off of the Atlas V rocket took place at 4:45 p.m. (EST) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Orbital ATK arranged to use United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket while it upgrades its Antares rocket, which failed due to a problem with its reconditioned Ukrainian engine.

After an eight-month hiatus, a USA supply ship is en-route to the International Space Station following Sunday’s successful liftoff of an Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo ship aboard a hired Atlas 5 rocket.

The six station astronauts – two of them deep into a one-year mission – have gone without American shipments since April. They even captured an incredible view of the liftoff.

Forecasters gave 40 percent odds of launching, better than the previous three days, when the weather foiled every effort to make the first USA shipment in months.

“The crew members need these critical supplies from the Earth to do their important work and we intend to do everything possible to enable their mission to continue”, added Frank Culbertson, president of Orbital ATK’s Space Systems Group and a former astronaut. A new light weight jet backpack astronauts will wear outside the space station is also aboard the arriving cargo ship.

The precious cargo inside the Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft is filled with mre than 7,000 pounds of food, equipment and scientific experiments for the six astronauts aboard the orbiting space laboratory. The space station remains the springboard to NASA’s next great leap in exploration, including future missions to an asteroid and Mars.

United Launch Alliance builds and flies the powerful Atlas V, a workhorse normally used to hoist satellites for the Air Force and others. 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.

The launch of the privately developed Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft began the company’s fourth operational cargo resupply mission, named CRS-4, under a commercial resupply services (CRS) contract to NASA. The other, SpaceX, like Orbital ATK, also had to shut down its services after its Falcon 9 rocket blew up over Port Canaveral, in June.

The California-based SpaceX aims to resume deliveries next month, while Virginia’s Orbital hopes to get its Antares flying again in May. NASA’s 30-year shuttle program proved expensive and complicated, and, on two flights, deadly.