NASA is aiming to move up Orbital ATK’s [OA] next Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) mission from December to October if the manifest allows, Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Bill Gerstenmaier said Sunday.
The announcement comes after the CRS program suffered its third consecutive failed mission with Sunday’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) failure on the company’s seventh CRS trip. Orbital ATK had its own Antares launch failure last October while a Russian progress spacecraft spun out of control in April on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). A Japanese cargo mission to ISS is scheduled for August. CRS is to deliver cargo, food and supplies to ISS.
NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said Wednesday no decision has been made on whether to move up Orbital ATK’s launch, which will take place from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on an Atlas V launch vehicle provided by United Launch Alliance (ULA). Orbital ATK’s Antares has been out of commission since October when it exploded shortly after liftoff at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Va.
Orbital ATK spokesman Barry Beneski said the company will be ready with Cygnus to support a mission as early as October, depending on what NASA and finding an available opening in ULA’s busy manifest.
Gerstenmaier said Orbital ATK and ULA have made very good technical progress to make a launch with Orbital ATK’s Cygnus space capsule on an Atlas V take place. Gerstenmaier said there was an adapter that had to be completed, plus various analyses with Cygnus on top of Atlas.
“We’re making pretty good process for Orbital ATK returning to flight on an Antares,” Gerstenmaier said Sunday during a press briefing.
Gerstenmaier said engine work on the RD-181 has been completed in Russia. Orbital ATK selected the Russian-developed RD-181 to replace the AJ-26 originally used in the Antares. The AJ-26 is a late ’60s-early ’70s Soviet-era NK-33 engine refurbished by Aerojet Rocketdyne [AJRD] and was used in the October Antares failure.
Orbital ATK President and CEO David Thompson said in a May earnings call that there were seven certification fires of the new engine between late March and early May. He also said at the time the first two flight engines were undergoing acceptance testing with the first one, he believed, completed the week of May 18 and the second engine to start acceptance testing in early June.
Thompson also said in May that launch complex repair work at MARS was on track for completion in September. He expected Orbital ATK would be able to conduct full system testing late this year and into January with an initial launch date for the re-engined Antares in March with about one month of schedule margin available to the company as of late May. Thompson’s remarks are courtesy of the Seeking Alpha website.
Gerstenmaier believed NASA could support test flights at MARS near the end of the year. He said this could include an Antares test firing with anticipation that Antares returns to flight sometime next spring. MARS has been out of commission since the October Antares failure.
A spokesman for Orbital ATK did not return multiple requests for comment. A spokeswoman with MARS was unable to comment by press time. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Boeing [BA].