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The International Space Station received its first shipment from a private, Virginia-based company in more than two years Sunday following a sensational nighttime launch observed 250 miles up and down the East Coast.
Orbital ATK's cargo ship pulled up at the space station bearing 5,000 pounds of food, equipment and research.
"What a beautiful vehicle," said Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, who used the station's big robot arm to grab the vessel. The capture occurred as the spacecraft soared 250 miles above Kyrgyzstan; Onishi likened it to the last 195 meters of a marathon.
Last Monday's liftoff from Wallops Island was the first by an Antares rocket since a 2014 launch explosion. Orbital ATK redesigned its Antares rocket and rebuilt the pad. While the Antares was grounded, Virginia-based Orbital ATK kept the NASA supply chain open with deliveries from Cape Canaveral, Florida, using another company's rocket.
NASA is paying Orbital ATK and SpaceX to stock the station, but now SpaceX is grounded. The California company is investigating why one of its Falcon rockets exploded in a massive fireball during launch pad testing on Sept. 1.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:29PM
I wanted to see this beautiful vehicle myself but the article only has one 512x311 pixel image. Found the original 1095x616 image but it isn't much better. http://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/wp-content/uploads/sites/240/2016/10/cygnus_captured.jpg [nasa.gov]
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:22PM
TLDR is watch next episode of "TWAN". In more detail:
The launch got second billing (still lots of coverage) on last weeks "This week at NASA" aka TWAN. The most recent episode was released before the vehicle arrived at the ISS.
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/twan_index.html [nasa.gov]
I would not be surprised if the next episode of TWAN covers the arrival, maybe even first billing, lots of TWAN coverage originating from the station is high def, might be your lucky day.
TWAN has a RSS feed, its not hard to find the program that injects RSS feed video blogs into mythtv as a recording source, so my superDVR magically presents me with the most recent TWAN (and plenty of other video). Future being unevenly distributed and all that. TWAN is a pretty good TV program, its just not a broadcast TV program... I wouldn't say the journalists on TWAN are full engineers but they're close or closer than any "normal journalist" so the journalist coverage is surprisingly good. I mean, journalists who can pronounce the words correctly shouldn't be a treat, yet it makes TWAN unusually good for science reporting?
The timing is much like legacy TV news, so each story is a minute to a couple minutes long and the entire show is always less than 10 minutes which is probably about as much "real news" is on legacy TV news. So it feels normal.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday October 30 2016, @11:32PM
Ah ha! It was on todays episode! And being TWAN its full high def, although only a minute long.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:22AM
You never will, and this is because there IS no vehicle. The "space program", which comes into the "private sector" variety these days is a hoax: no machines "orbit" the Earth, as common sense and physics can tell you. Satellites allegedly measure in the tens of thousands, yet nobody ever seen one.
Are there moving lights on the dome? You bet. Have they been put there by NASA and "the private space sector" (which audaciously advertises itself as a thing)? No, they have not.
One word: thermosphere.