US space station delivery set to resume after 8-month stoppage

During the meeting, senior NASA, U.S. Air Force, Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance managers assessed the risks associated with the mission and determined the Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and personnel are ready for launch.

Orbital Science was set to launch its Cygnus cargo spacecraft on Thursday, but thick clouds and rain over its launch site in Florida forced Orbital ATK to postpone the launch until Friday, 4:33 p.m. EST.

An enhanced version of Orbital’s Cygnus cargo vessel, which can carry 53 percent more than its previous version, is loaded with 7,700 pounds of crew supplies, station hardware, and science experiments.

With the upcoming holidays the crew’s family has the opportunity to send Christmas gifts to their family members on the International Space Station.

The United Launch Alliance will try again Friday evening to launch an Atlas V rocket after poor weather conditions scrubbed Thursday’s launch attempt.

Orbital ATK is using another company’s rocket to launch this shipment because its own rocket, the Antares, remains grounded. SpaceX, the other supplier, suffered a launch failure in June.

“I’m guessing that Santa’s sleigh is somewhere inside the Cygnus, and they’re probably excited about their stockings coming up, too”, Culbertson, president of the company’s space systems group, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Ukraine-related trade sanctions enacted previous year ban US military use of the RD-180 engines. The light emitted will be visible for the first 4 minutes and 15 seconds of the launch out to a radius of about 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Cape Canaveral – an area about three times the size of Texas. A fire and explosion in the old Russian rocket engines doomed the October 2014 flight, the company’s fourth resupply mission.

Orbital ATK is a global leader in aerospace and defense technologies. Cygnus will be launched into a targeted orbit of 143 x 144 miles above the Earth, inclined at 51.64 degrees to the equator. One was designed, tested and built by students at St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, Virginia – the first such effort by elementary-age children.