A cargo spacecraft launched with Ukrainian assistance

The Ukrainian rocket industry helped an American company to launch a new carrier rocket designed to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). The Antares rocket has been launched successfully from the Wallops Island Space Center, Virginia, at midnight Kyiv time on April 22. A private American company Orbital Sciences Corporation has led its development. The rocket is a two-stage vehicle and carries the cargo spacecraft Cygnus as its payload. The vehicle’s first stage, featuring a Russian engine and designed by the Pivdenne Design Bureau in Dnipropetrovsk, is manufactured at the Yuzhmash plant in cooperation with Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Chernihiv and Kyiv-based companies. According to the design bureau’s information center, “the launch achieved all its objectives.” After a ten-minute test flight, the Cygnus’s cargo compartment was successfully detached from the fuel tanks.

Provided the Antares tests succeed, the Orbital Sciences Corporation will get the right to transport cargo to the ISS. The first such flight is tentatively slated for the fall of 2013, allowing the Cygnus to join the company of the Space Shuttle and Russian Progress cargo spacecraft which served this destination before. The latest rocket launch was carried out according to the agreement between the abovementioned private company and the National Aerospace Agency of the United States (NASA). The plan calls for ten spacecraft launches, with two of them being test ones. The NASA’s representatives said they are counting on private companies for the delivery of cargo to the ISS because the agency wanted to focus on the more ambitious and important research projects in the Solar system, including preparations for a Mars mission. Currently, the NASA’s specialists are involved in developing the largest-ever rocket, called the Space Launch System, and the Orion spaceship. In any case, the Ukrainian rocket designers and manufacturers, acting as subcontractors in the project to develop a cargo spacecraft for the ISS, have secured jobs and financial revenues for themselves. “The Antares project is a good example of the Ukrainian space industry’s involvement in international space projects and its prominent presence in the global market space,” the Pivdenne Design Bureau’s press release reads. The White House welcomes the Antares’s launch, too, as shown by the Senior Advisor to the US President on Science and Technology Issues John Holdren’s statement. “Today’s successful test flight of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket from the spaceport at Wallops Island demonstrates an additional private space-launch capability for the United States and lays the groundwork for the first Antares cargo mission to the International Space Station later this year,” the press service’s statement reads. The statement stresses also that the growing potential of America’s commercial space industry and NASA’s use of public-private partnerships are central to President Obama’s strategy to ensure the nation’s leadership in space exploration.