Spaceship ATK Cygnus Meets the International Space Station

After it had been launched almost a week ago, the spaceship ATK Cygnus landed at the International Space Station. The event took place on October 23, at about four hundred above the Indian Ocean. The craft has attached itself to ISS’ port which faces Terra. This ship was designed under the contract NASA Commercial Resupply Services, being the first spacecraft from the reconfigured Antares medium-class.

The spaceship ATK Cygnus represented has undergone the third journey. After the failure of Antares craft on the Orb-3 mission, the Orbital ATK Cygnus needed to speed up the process of upgrading to still honor NASA’s contract.

During the two years in which the Antares vehicle was on the ground, the spaceship was undergoing a series of test and the manufacturing was checked. In the meantime, the spaceship ATK Cygnus teamed up with the United Launch Alliance to decide upon the launch of OA-4, back in 2015, on December 6 and the launch of OA-6 this year, on March 23.

Both spacecraft were the improved version of the spacecraft called Cygnus. Nevertheless, the purpose was to release CRS missions from the orbital point site known as ATK, located at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. The landing of OA-5 seems to reveal that the Orbital ATK is a step away from a mission abundant in similar such events.

Frank Culbertson, who is the president of the Orbital ATK’s Space Systems Group, has argued that the OA-5 mission is different from all others, being unique for the ATK team. This spaceship represented the team’s return to their home base processes at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. From there, they managed to set up in cosmos the spaceship ATK Cygnus which was upgraded to render critical cargo to the ISS.

When the team begins the journey that will lead them home, they will use Cygnus as a module to convey scientific experiments. Even if the primary goal of the spaceship ATK Cygnus mission is to deliver the cargo to ISS, it still has a lot of many other attributions which need to be fulfilled after it will accomplish its duty related to ISS.

While the Spacecraft Fire Experiment known as Safire-I is currently under development on the OA-6 mission, the Saffire-II experiment was designated to OA-5. This series of experiments was designed to examine how materials burn and how flames propagate.

Image source: wikipedia