Status
Success
CRS Orb-D1
Wed Sep 18, 2013 14:58 UTC
Orbital Sciences COTS demonstration flight. First Cygnus mission, first mission to rendezvous with ISS, first mission to berth with ISS. The rendezvous between the new Cygnus cargo freighter and the International Space Station was delayed due to a computer data link problem, but the issue was resolved and berthing followed shortly thereafter. Last flight of Antares 110.
Rocket
Mission Details
Cygnus Orb-D1
Cygnus Orb-D1, also known as Cygnus 1 and Orbital Sciences COTS Demo Flight, was the first flight of the Cygnus unmanned resupply spacecraft developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation. It was named after the late NASA astronaut and Orbital Sciences executive G. David Low.
Northrop Grumman (formerly Orbital ATK) and NASA jointly developed a new space transportation system to provide commercial cargo resupply services to the International Space Station. The Cygnus cargo ship consists of two parts, a service module built in the USA based on the GEOStar platform, and a pressurized module, manufactured in France and Italy by Thales Alenia. The cargo is sent into orbit by a launcher specially developed for this purpose.
Antares has a first stage based on Energiya lateral blocks, made in Ukraine by Yuzhnoye. It was initially powered by two NK-33s, built in the 1960s for the Soviet N1 lunar launcher, before being replaced by RD-181s, derived from the RD-170s installed on Energiya and Zenit. The second stage, a Castor-30, is made in the USA, by Northrop Grumman.
CRS Orb-D1 was captured by RMS on 29/09/2013 at 11:00 and berthed to the Nadir port of the Harmony module of the International Space Station on 29/09/2013 at 12:44 UTC. Its stay on the ISS was 22 days. It was unberthed on 22/10/2013 at 10:04 UTC and released by RMS on 22/10/2013 at 11:31 UTC. It deorbited on 23/10/2013 at 18:16 UTC.