Antares Beyond Cygnus

Jason Davis of the Planetary Society asked Orbital ATK about their plans for Antares beyond CRS missions:

For example, we plan to offer Antares for NASA science mission launches. In pursuit of that goal, we’ve on-ramped the Antares to the NLS-II contract used by NASA/KSC to procure science mission launches. By the terms of that contract, we need to have a first flight of the 230 configuration under our belts before we can bid on any missions.

I’ll be interested in what kinds of missions Antares launches in the future, and how viable a market it could be for Orbital ATK. Antares—due to its launch site and payload capacity—has a somewhat limited mission scope. We don’t yet know what they’d sell launches for, so that’s the big variable here.

Orbital ATK’s next-generation launch vehicle will obviously look to compete for national security contracts, larger science missions, and maybe even commercial contracts, so they’ll be active in a lot of markets over the next decade.