Cygnus NG-19

NG-19 is the nineteenth planned flight of the Northrop Grumman robotic resupply spacecraft Cygnus and its sixteenth flight to the International Space Station under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA. This is the eighth launch of Cygnus under the CRS-2 contract.

Mission

Northrop Grumman is celebrating a decade of commercial resupply services missions. To date, Cygnus has delivered approximately 130,000 lbs. of critical cargo, supplies, equipment and experiments to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

For this mission, Cygnus will once again host NASA’s Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment (SAFFIRE), enabling scientists to continue studying the way fire behaves in microgravity. The experiment will be conducted after Cygnus has departed the station as part of the NG-19’s secondary mission.

Northrop Grumman is proud to name the NG-19 Cygnus spacecraft in remembrance and celebration of the life of NASA astronaut Dr. Laurel Clark.

It is the company’s tradition to name each Cygnus spacecraft in honor of an individual who has made substantial contributions to human spaceflight. Dr. Clark was an accomplished undersea medical officer and naval flight surgeon prior to her NASA career. During her first and only spaceflight, STS-107, Dr. Clark and the rest of the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia tragically lost their lives on Feb. 1, 2003 when the shuttle did not survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Caption courtesy of Northrop Grumman.

The Antares rocket was designed to serve NASA's cargo launch market need for a resupply vehicle to the International Space Station.

Originally named Taurus II, it is an expendable rocket developed and built by Orbital Sciences and is now owned and operated by Northrop Grumman.

It has only launched Cygnus crafts to the Station but is available on the wider commercial market.

Somewhat unique in the rocket world, it uses a liquid fueled first stage and a solid propellant second stage. Most rockets use liquid fueled second stages as it is far easier to get a perfect initial orbit with liquid propellant engines than with solid propellant rockets.

Antares has four variants, the current being the Antares 230+ which flew for the first time on October 17th, 2016.

Antares 230+:

Height: 42.5 m / 139 ft
Diameter: 3.9 m / 13 ft
Mass: 289,000 kg / 657,000 lb
Payload to LEO: 8,000 kg / 18,000 lb

First stage:
Engine: 2 x RD-181
Thrust: 3,844 kN / 864,000 lbf (total)
Fuel: Liquid Oxygen / RP-1 kerosene
Burn time: 215 seconds

Second stage - Castor 30XL:
Engine: Solid Rocket Motor
Thrust: 474 kN / 107,000 lbf
Propellant: Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene / aluminium
Burn time: 156 seconds

Image: NASA

The Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) is a commercial space launch facility located at the southern tip of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.

MARS began in July 2003 as a joint venture between Virginia and Maryland.

The first rocket launch from MARS occurred on December 16th, 2006 and was an Orbital Sciences Minotaur I rocket with the TacSat-2/GeneSat-1 payload.

To date, MARS has hosted the four Antares rocket variants, the Minotaur I, Minotaur V, and ALV X-1 rockets.

The Minotaurs and Antares were at first Orbital Sciences rockets and ALV X-1 was an ATK rocket. With the merger of Orbital Science and ATK into Orbital ATK, and Orbital ATK's subsequent purchase by Northrop Grumman, Northrop Grumman now technically owns all of the rockets (or at least their designs) that have ever flown from MARS.

After launch, Cygnus will spend a few days boosting itself up to the International Space Station. When it arrives, two crew members will grab it with the Station's robotic arm, Canadarm2, and berth it to the Earth-facing, or Nadir, port on the Unity module.

Unity, also called Node-1, was the second module of the ISS to be launched. Taken to orbit on the STS-88 mission of Shuttle Endeavour, Unity was joined to the Russian Zarya ("dawn") module on December 6th, 1998.

The Unity nadir port hosted two Space Shuttle dockings on the STS-97 and STS-98 missions of the Shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis in December 2000 and February 2001.

Since December 2015, it has been the only berthing port used for the Cygnus cargo spacecraft.

Picture: The Unity module (no solar panels), with its nadir port visible in its center, is joined via spacewalk (astronaut visible to right of where Unity and Zarya connect) to the Zarya module during STS-88 in December 1998. Credit: NASA