This is the pre-launch news conference held Dec. 2 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for liftoff of the Orbital ATK commercial Cygnus cargo ship aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket for the International Space Station.
See earlier Cygnus OA-4 coverage.
Our Atlas archive.
Russia’s Progress MS-09 cargo craft made a 3-hour, 40-minute trip from a launch pad in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station on Monday, setting a record for the quickest journey to the orbiting research laboratory. Look back on the mission’s predawn launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and radar-guided docking at the space station with these images and videos.
Technicians inched the two halves of the Atlas 5’s aluminum nose cone around NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to package the asteroid sample return probe, then moved the satellite to the rocket’s assembly building and hoisted it aboard the two-stage booster during the final days of August for the Sept. 8 launch.
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