NASA commercial cargo provider Northrop Grumman is scheduled to launch its next resupply mission to the International Space Station at 9:59 a.m. EDT Saturday, Nov. 2. NASAs prelaunch coverage will air live on NASA Television and the agencys website beginning Friday, Nov. 1.
Loaded with around 8,200 pounds of research, crew supplies, and hardware, Northrop Grummans 12th commercial resupply mission for the space station will launch on the companys Cygnus cargo spacecraft on an Antares rocket from Virginia Spaces Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASAs Wallops Flight Facility.
The Cygnus spacecraft, dubbed the SS Alan Bean, is named after the late Apollo and Skylab astronaut who died on May 26, 2018, at the age of 86. This Cygnus will launch 50 years to the month after Bean, Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon flew to the Moon on NASAs Apollo 12 mission, during which Bean became the fourth human to walk on the lunar surface. Bean was the lunar module pilot aboard Intrepid with mission commander Conrad when they landed on Moon at the Ocean of Storms on Nov. 19, 1969.
With a Nov. 2 launch, the Cygnus spacecraft will arrive at the space station Monday, Nov. 4 at about 5:45 a.m., Expedition 61 NASA astronaut Jessica Meir will grapple the spacecraft using the stations robotic arm. She will be backed up by NASA astronaut Christina Koch. After Cygnus capture, ground controllers will command the stations arm to rotate and install Cygnus on the bottom of the stations Unity module.
Complete NASA TV coverage of activities is as follows:
Friday, Nov. 1
- 11:30 a.m. Whats on Board science briefing
- Pete Hasbrook, manager of International Space Station Program Science Office at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston
- Liz Warren, associate program scientist with the U.S. National Lab
- Sam Ting, Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 (AMS-2) principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Ken Bollweg, AMS project manager at Johnson
- Kathleen Coderre, principal investigator for AstroRad Vest at Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, Colorado, and Oren Milstein, co-founder and chief scientific officer for StemRad
- Alessandro Grattoni, chairman of the Department of NanoMedicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, and Maurizio Geggiani, chief technology officer at Automobili Lamborghini, for the CraigX Flight Test Platform
- Mary Murphy, senior internal payloads manager for the Zero-G Oven at Nanoracks LLC in Washington
- 2:30 p.m. Prelaunch news conference
- Kirk Shireman, manager of NASAs International Space Station Program at Johnson
- Pete Hasbrook
- Jeff Reddish, Wallops Range Antares project manager
- Frank DeMauro, vice president and general manager of Space Systems at Northrop Grumman
- Kurt Eberly, Antares vice president at Northrop Grumman
Saturday, Nov. 2
- 9:30 a.m. Launch coverage begins for a 9:59 a.m. liftoff
Monday, Nov. 4
- 4:10 a.m. Coverage of Cygnus capture with the space stations robotic arm
- 6:30 a.m. Cygnus installation operations coverage
