CAPE CANAVERAL — An unmanned Cygnus supply ship is headed for a Saturday morning rendezvous with the International Space Station after an 11:05 p.m. ET Tuesday blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket.
The 194-foot United Launch Alliance rocket blazed into a night sky brightened by a nearly full moon, carrying the Orbital ATK Cygnus packed with 7,500 pounds of food, equipment and science experiments.
“These resupply missions are critical,” Kenny Todd, NASA’s space station operations integration manager, said before the launch. “They’ve kind of become our lifeblood on space station.”
Orbital ATK named this Cygnus spacecraft the S.S. Rick Husband, honoring the late NASA astronaut who piloted the first space shuttle to dock with the ISS in 1999 and led the Columbia crew lost during re-entry in 2003.
Husband’s wife, Evelyn, and two children were on hand to see the launch.
About 21 minutes after liftoff, the Cygnus separated from the rocket’s Centaur upper stage and began working to chase down the station and its six-person crew flying 250 miles above the planet.
NASA astronaut Tim Kopra plans to snare the Cygnus with the station’s 58-foot robotic arm when it pulls within range before 7 a.m. Saturday.
The launch was the second of two Cygnus mission flown from Florida aboard the Atlas V rocket.
Orbital ATK this summer plans to resume launching the Cygnus from Virginia’s Eastern Shore on its Antares rocket, which has been outfitted with new main engines after a launch failure in 2014.
More supplies will be launched to the ISS soon: A Russian Progress ship is scheduled to fly next week, followed by a SpaceX Dragon capsule targeting an April 8 liftoff from Cape Canaveral.
NASA says the outpost’s stores of “consumables” like food and water are essentially back to normal.
“At this point the ISS is in really good shape,” said Kenny Todd, NASA’s ISS operations and integration manager. “Consumables-wise, we’re in very, very good shape.”
The upcoming mission includes an interesting batch of science investigations, including:
• An experiment that will light a fire inside the Cygnus after it departs the station roughly two months from now.
Fire in space is difficult subject to study because of the danger it would pose to astronauts. Aiming to improve the safety of future exploration missions, the first Saffire experiment will perform a controlled burn of a three-foot piece of fabric inside a box. Most past combustion tests have been limited to the size of note cards.
“To really understand it, you’ve got to look at something that’s more of a realistic size,” said Gary Ruff, the experiment’s co-investigator from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
• Gecko Grippers will test how well five adhesive pads stick to station walls.
“We are taking inspiration from one of nature’s best climbers, which are the feet of gecko lizards,” said Aaron Parness, the lead scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The robotic grippers, which turn their stickiness on or off depending how pressure is applied, could support space jobs from station inspections to repairing satellites. And they could climb into your home someday.
“You can imagine hanging pictures or flat-screen TVs on the wall without having to drill into your wall,” said Parness. “When you want to move houses or move where the picture is, you simply unstick the adhesive and put it somewhere else.”
• An improved 3-D printer for building parts in space.
“We like to think of it now that people have two options,” said Matt Napoli of Moffett Field, Calif.-based Made In Space. “They can send their hardware on the rocket to the space station, or they can just send us a digital file, and we’ll create your part on station.”
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