Main Engine Cut OffThe mission status report says, “The team is still investigating the cause of the reboot and assessing two main engine check valves.” and gives no other update on the delayed orbit-lowering maneuver. The lack of information on that front is a little worrying, to say the least.
I took a trip down to Wallops Island, Virginia this week for the launch of OA-5—the return to flight for Antares, sending Cygnus up to the ISS on a resupply mission. I recorded this episode on the long drive home afterwards, and talked about what Antares’ return means for Orbital ATK and what their future may hold—both good and bad.
There have been some revelations on the SpaceX front on how they’ll handle the production of Dragons moving forward, and how they’ll introduce propulsive landings.
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.
The RFI seems to indicate that an extended Cygnus would be a great fit for the flight, as we’ve seen Orbital ATK talking up previously.
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Scheduling the launch for the last slot in the initial window without a comment doesn’t express a lot of confidence. Rollout is scheduled for Tuesday (October 11), at which point the storm should be well out of the way.
Alejandro G. Belluscio of NASASpaceFlight wrote a fantastic piece on Raptor with quite a few interesting tidbits.
Last week on the podcast, Jake from WeMartians joined me for a discussion of our initial reactions to SpaceX’s Mars architecture. Today, I’m on his podcast with a bit of a deeper dive.
Orbital ATK posted a video over on YouTube showing their ideas for placing Cygnus-derived habitats in lunar orbit, and using them as the base for SLS-Orion missions throughout the 2020s. It also hints at the station staying there beyond the initial missions and supporting European (or other international) missions to the lunar surface.