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Cygnus Berthed To International Space Station
“The Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo ship was bolted into place on the International Space Station’s Earth-facing port of the Unity module at 9:26 a.m. EST. Cygnus is the first cargo ship to be berthed to the Earth-facing port on the Unity module.”
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
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Excellent recovery. Excellent upgrade. Well done Orbital Sciences!
Congrats to Orbital ATK for what looks to be another successful ISS resupply mission!
And props to ULA for not exploding.
That went rather well. Why not use Atlas for the rest of the Cygnus missions?
$$$$
Are you saying the total cost to NASA of the Antares failure was less than the cost difference of using Atlas instead of Antares to fly out the remainder of the Cygnus contract?
I don’t know myself, but it would be interesting to see the numbers. This question of cost versus reliability is starting to move out of the realm of hypothetical discussion.
No, I’m saying Orbital ATK would prefer to keep much of the launch costs from ISS resupply missions “in house” by flying on their re-engined Antares, rather than sending all of the money for the launch to ULA for Atlas V flights.
So what about the cost to NASA of the failed mission? Are you saying that it is ok for Orbital to maximize their profit from servicing NASA’s contract by leaving NASA (i.e. the taxpayers) to eat the cost of covering the risk involved in said profit maximization? Sounds like a lousy deal for the taxpayers.
Why should NASA care about how much money Orbital gets to keep? Isn’t their job to get the best value for the money spent?
As far as I know, Orbital ATK did not get paid for the failed mission. That’s kind of the point of the way that the Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew contracts are structured. The companies involved only get paid when they meet milestones.
Well I should hope it goes without saying that Orbital didn’t get paid for the failed launch. The costs I’m asking about are the rest of the cost of the mission – the payloads, the operations to support the mission, the planning, etc. All those were costs that NASA had to pay outside of what was paid to Orbital. So who covers those lost costs? Did NASA have to pay for insurance for the mission or just eat the loss, or did Orbital reimburse NASA or cover the cost of insurance? If it was NASA that got stuck with it, then that means the taxpayers were effectively funding part of the risk Orbital took on Antares to maximize their profits. To be fair, up to the first failure, the difference in risk wasn’t really an easily quantifiable factor. However, for future missions it is clear that Antares is a much riskier option than Atlas and NASA should factor that into the decision on which launcher to use, unless Orbital is somehow covering the cost difference to NASA for the additional risk. In other words, Orbital should be paying the cost of payload insurance or replacement or it should be NASA’s choice to dictate flying on Atlas.