Following a one day delay, due to a wayward plane during the countdown yesterday, Orbital ATK successfully launched their Cygnus spacecraft, S.S. Gene Cernan today for an International Space Station rendezvous on Tuesday.
This was the second Cygnus launch on the companies own Antares 230 vehicle, which uses the Russia RD-181 engines. This was the seventh launch of Antares with six successfully completing their missions and one failure. That failure led to the redesign of the Antares rocket which caused a two-year delay in launches, during that time Orbital made use of United Launch Alliances Atlas V to launch Cygnus to the ISS.
Leave a Reply