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<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\nImage credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
Orbital Sciences<\/strong> is preparing for the first-ever launch of its 135-foot-tall Antares rocket. The Antares is scheduled for liftoff at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 17, from NASA\u2019s<\/strong> Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. <\/p>\n The test flight (A-ONE mission) is the first of two Orbital is scheduled to conduct this year under its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Space Act Agreement with NASA. If A-ONE is successful, the company will carry out a full flight demonstration of its new Antares\/Cygnus cargo delivery system to the International Space Station (ISS) around mid-year. NASA has invested approximately $288 million in the Antares technology. <\/p>\n The two-stage rocket is powered by engines from Aerojet-General and will take an 8,300-pound mock cargo capsule 160 miles above Earth. The capsule will carry instruments to collect data and will remain in orbit for a few months until natural gravitation pulls it toward the Earth and causes it to burn up in the atmosphere. <\/p>\n This year Orbital will also perform its first of eight scheduled operational cargo resupply missions to the ISS under a $1.9 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. After the agency\u2019s space shuttled retired, it opened up the doors for commercial companies to preform these flights. So far, SpaceX <\/strong>has conducted two successful resupply missions and now Orbital joins the competition. <\/p>\n \n Tags: NASA, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, Antares, Launch Vehicle Publication: LATimes.com Publication Date: 04\/16\/2013 The Antares rocket at NASA\u2019s Wallops Flight Facility. Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Orbital Sciences is preparing for the first-ever launch of its 135-foot-tall Antares rocket. The Antares is scheduled for liftoff at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 17, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"\/Assets\/Image\/FullStoryArrow.png\")
Full story<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"