SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Northrup Grumman NG-20 mission towards ISS this afternoon. The launch was at 12:07 PM EST from the company’s launch pad at SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and once it had completed its part of the mission, Booster 1077 completed its tenth flight when it safely touched down at Landing Zone 1, about 5.6 miles to the south of where it launched a little more than eight minutes earlier.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Northrup Grumman NG-20 mission towards ISS this afternoon. The launch was at 12:07 PM EST from the company’s launch pad at SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and once it had completed its part of the mission, Booster 1077 completed its tenth flight when it safely touched down at Landing Zone 1, about 5.6 miles to the south of where it launched a little more than eight minutes earlier.
Today’s launch was the first of three that Northrup Grumman has contracted with SpaceX, and is the twentieth ISS resupply mission that the company has flown. According to NASA, the Cygnus cargo spacecraft is carrying 3,017 pounds of experiments, 2,493 pounds of hardware, 2,490 pounds of crew supplies, 149 pounds of computer resources and 35 pounds of spacewalk equipment.
Some of that cargo was loaded in the past 24 hours — foodstuffs (ice cream for the astronauts is rumored to be that portion of the payload) as well as some of the materials for science experiments required a “late-load,” which is a new capability for SpaceX that necessitated a one-delay from the initial planned launch date of January 29.
“We’re going to do a late-load activity into the Cygnus vehicle [so] we modified the fairing that’s the covering that goes on the outside of the Falcon rocket to include a 5-foot by 4-foot wide door. It essentially allows us to enter into the fairing area and put late-load car cargo in,” William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president ofBuild and Flight Reliability, said in a news conference on January 26th.
Cygnus is expected to arrive at the International Space Station, where it will be docked to the orbiting facility’s Unity module by astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli.
Now in orbit, the Cygnus cargo spacecraft will arrive at the International astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli will grapple it using ISS’s Canadarm 2 robotic arm, and the crew will then dock Cygnus to the Unity module. Following some normal checkouts, later, astronauts will then open the hatch to Cygnus and will begin to unload the cargo within the spacecraft.
The Cygus spacecraft is expected to stay at the International Space Station for up to six months. The spacecraft may perform additional services such as reboosting the station’s orbit to counteract atmospheric drag. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus provides the only U.S. spacecraft reboost capability for the International Space Station.
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With about six hours left in the countdown to liftoff, SpaceX announced that they are canceling today’s planned launch of Falcon 9 carrying four astronauts to orbit aboard a Crew Dragon to the International Space Station. The mission on behalf of Axiom Space is dubbed Axiom-3 and will now launch NET Thursday, January 18, 2024 at 4:47 PM EST.
The 45th Weather Squadron has released its official Launch Mission Execution Forecast for tomorrow’s planned crewed launch of Axiom-3 by SpaceX. According to forecasters, there is less than a 5% Probability of Violation of weather conditions, meaning the weather is expected to be almost perfect, especially by Florida standards: they expect a 95% or greater chance of acceptable weather conditions. The launch is planned for 5:11 PM EST. Once in orbit, the astronauts will travel to the International Space Station for an anticipated 14-day stay.
For United Launch Alliance, at least nine years of hard work will be put to the test when their new Vulcan rocket leaves the launch pad and heads towards space. The rocket was first announced in 2015, several months after the company forged a partnership with Blue Origin to develop engines to power a new booster platform. Since that time, the company has worked steadily on building their new rocket, Vulcan. At the time of this writing, ULA states that they are ready to launch Vulcan, and the latest forecasts from the 45th Weather Wing give an 85% chance of acceptable flight conditions. All of that work will be put to the ultimate test at 2:18 am tomorrow morning when Vulcan lifts off of SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
NASA announced recently that it has resumed Hubble Space Telescope operations after a fifteen day outage following gyroscope issues aboard the venerable orbiting telescope. Observations on some instruments resumed December 8, and have continued for the past week, with others slated to come on line at some point in the near future.
United Launch Alliance conducted a second Wet Dress Rehearsal test for its new Vulcan rocket on December 12, 2023 at the company’s launch pad on the Cape Canaveral Space Force station. According to CEO Tory Bruno, the results were successful, clearing the way for Vulcan’s inaugural launch early next month.
SpaceX launched their 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission on November 10, 2023, sending roughly 6,500 pounds of research gear, supplies and equipment to the International Space Station. The company launched a Falcon 9 from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, and the first stage booster landed a few miles south at LZ-1 approximately eight minutes later.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from Pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on September 3, 2023. This mission carried another batch of Starlink satellites to orbit and it was a record-breaking 62nd orbital launch of the year for SpaceX. There have been 46 launches from Cape Canaveral / Kennedy Space Center this year, with all but two coming from SpaceX.
Crew-7 crew members NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, commander; ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, pilot; and mission specialists JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 as it lifts off from Kennedy Space Center on August 26, 2023.
The launch was captured from several angles and this video was assembled using Florida Media Now’s Mark Stone and my elements, then edited together by me. It was a true team effort.
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