Antares Rocket Launch 2016
The Orbital ATK Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard, launches from Pad-0A, Monday, Oct. 17, 2016 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Orbital ATK’s sixth contracted cargo resupply mission with NASA to the International Space Station is delivering over 5,100 pounds of science and research, crew supplies and vehicle hardware to the orbital laboratory and its crew. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
October 18, 2016
Recently, on October 17, Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket had a very successful launch, and now it is on its way to the International Space Station. This rocket is the succession of a previous one that was launched in 2014, also named Antares, which unfortunately exploded whilst traveling into the stratosphere.
What made the first Antares rocket fail has a bit of speculation, but the main source of evidence is a claim from Orbital Sciences, where the actual faults were in two refurbished Russian AJ-26 engines implemented into the rocket (1). The cons of this launch was that, obviously, being that Orbital ATK is a space launch company, they lost a huge sum of revenue from customers going to other launch companies and the incident took away the value of Orbital ATK’s stock, (dropping about 15%). The pro is that they learned from their mistake and said that they wouldn’t use these engines in the latter production of Antares until the engines are changed and fixed. Up until the new Antares launch, they used other multiple other launch systems as a means to get supplies to the space station.
Now, with the successful launch of the new Antares, Orbital Sciences along with the International Space Station can see great benefits from this. The main purpose of Antares is to resupply the space station, and the benefit of the rocket is that it can hold payloads heavier than 11,000 lbs. How this works is that when Antares reaches low Earth orbit, the rocket ejects a cargo carrying capsule named Cygnus, which then attaches to the space station. This is the biggest rocket Orbital Sciences has launched, and now, seeing that this has been a successful launch mission thus far, the company will see benefits in customer and stock growth.
Sources:
(1): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/193129-antares-rocket-explodes-during-launch