SpaceX’s latest launch to the International Space Station (ISS), which was yet another mission of firsts, has led to the company becoming the only U.S. firm capable of meeting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) needs to deliver cargo and crew to the ISS. The latest launch was for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, which sent a batch of scientific and medical instruments to ISS.
While SpaceX and Grumman are both capable of delivering cargo to the space station, SpaceX is now the only U.S. rocket launch services provider that can lift off ISS missions from the U.S. Northrop plans to use its upgraded Antares rockets for future flights, but all Cygnus missions planned for 2024 are booked with SpaceX as the Falcon 9 is the workhorse rocket in the U.S. for medium lift payloads.
NASA Sends Surgical Robot, Semiconductor Fabrication Platform To Space
While they typically don’t elicit much media or public interest, NASA’s cargo missions to the ISS represent the cutting edge of many fields. For the Northrop Grumman and SpaceX NG-20 mission today, NASA-backed contracts have sent a surgical robot and a chip fabrication machine to space.
As part of its vast economic plans for a low Earth orbit (LEO) economy, NASA has awarded contracts to a large number of private companies, with two of these part of the NG-20 mission that also marked the Falcon 9’s success in becoming the only rocket in the U.S. demonstrably capable of conducting ISS missions.
Before today’s launch, NASA’s CRS missions for Northrop relied on the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas and Northrop’s Antares rockets. Northrop and SpaceX are old competitors for NASA contracts, with the Antares being developed specifically to meet the launch needs of the Cygnus for CRS missions.
However, when the NASA commercial resupply services contracts were awarded, there were no limitations on U.S. companies for buying Russian engines for their rockets. The award was before political crises in 2014, which eventually meant that companies like Northrop Grumman and ULA that used Russian engines would have to develop new rockets to remove vulnerabilities. These systems have just started to take flight, with the ULA Vulcan rocket sending NASA’s first lander mission to the Moon since the Apollo program in January.
In the meantime, SpaceX is now the only company that can send NASA crew and cargo to the ISS. The Falcon 9’s NG-20 launch marked SpaceX’s tenth mission for the year, as part of its efforts to cross a hundred launches in 2024 to become the only company in human history to have done so. Today’s launch took off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at noon.
It also included remarkable views of the Falcon 9 during engine reignition for landing. Since it plans to use a single Falcon 9 booster several times, SpaceX has been able to squeeze out as much performance from the rocket as possible. For its recent ISS launches, this has enabled the Falcon 9 to land on land far more frequently when compared to the rocket’s profile for previous launches.
SpaceX also had to upgrade the Falcon 9’s second stage to accommodate the Cygnus. Rocket development typically depends on the payload that it will fly, and for the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s second stage fairing had to be modified to allow SpaceX to load special cargo at the pad.
SpaceX’s Jessie Anderson described the changes:
In order to support Cygnus missions, SpaceX designed a custom fairing and a mobile transfer truck with a mobile clean room to support late load operations which happen when the rocket is horizontal and on the pad. Late load refers to loading cargo in the final hours before launch, and after a spacecraft has already been encapsulated inside the fairing. The fairing modification includes a new roughly five foot by four foot fairing door that opens directly into the mobile cleanroom.
At t minus 24 hours late load ops began. Techs removed the doors and opened the Cygnus’s forward hatch to load time sensitive cargo right on the pad. And then at t minus seven hours, Falcon 9 went vertical.
Some of the payloads flying to the ISS include a surgical robot and a chip fabrication machine designed to evaluate the suitability of space for these complex processes. Medical operations are a crucial part of NASA’s plans as it gears up to establishing a presence on the Moon. Similarly, semiconductor fabrication is one of the hardest tasks on Earth since the purity of the products is indispensable to their performance. Space, on the other hand, offers researchers the opportunity to see whether constraints such as convection and sedimentation can be avoided in the manufacturing process.
Congrats to the @NorthropGrumman and @SpaceX teams on today’s successful launch of Cygnus NG-20 to the @Space_Station. This is Falcon 9’s second launch to the orbiting laboratory in under two weeks and 10th launch so far this year!!
— Gwynne Shotwell (@Gwynne_Shotwell) January 30, 2024
