[ad_1]
Watch live coverage of the launch in the video player above, scheduled for 9:38 pm EDT.
After back-to-back military and commercial launch tests, NASA hoped for better luck Thursday night with Northrop Grumman’s planned launch of a space station-bound Cygnus cargo ship carrying four tons of supplies and equipment, including a new $ 23 million women’s restroom space.
“When astronauts have to go, we want to allow them to do it bravely,” joked Jim Fuller of Collins Aerospace, builder of the zero-gravity toilet.
Mounted on an Antares 230+ rocket, the pilotless Cygnus spacecraft was scheduled to take off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Test Facility, Virginia, at 9:38 p.m. EDT .
POT
If all goes well, the spacecraft will launch into a preliminary orbit about nine minutes after launch, setting up a weekend rendezvous and docking at the International Space Station on Sunday morning.
The Antares and Cygnus spacecraft are making Northrop Grumman’s 14th payload headed for the International Space Station.
The upgraded Cygnus is packed with high-priority science gear, crew supplies and spares, sophisticated camera gear, and even some Estée Lauder face cream for a business photo shoot, along with the new Universal Waste Management System toilet.
The zero-gravity toilet is 65% smaller and 40% lighter than the urinal currently used in the US segment of the space station. It features multiple design enhancements that will be tested on the space station before they are finally incorporated into the moon-bound Orion capsules in NASA’s Artemis program.
POT
While saving weight and reducing the toilet footprint were the main goals, “another big part of our project was optimizing toilet use for the female crew,” said Melissa McKinley, NASA project manager.
And that includes better adaptations for what she called “dual operations.”
“NASA spent a lot of time working with the crew members and doing evaluations to improve the use of the toilet seat and urine funnel to make it more comfortable for the crew to use.”
Camera equipment and commercial photoshoot.
Also on board: a 360-degree virtual reality camera provided by a company that wants to give the public a better idea of what it’s like to live and work in space. The camera will be mounted on the station’s robotic arm to document upcoming spacewalks from a new perspective.
“We will record an entire spacewalk from the moment the astronauts leave the station to the moment they return, and the audience will feel as if they are really there, floating in the vacuum of space alongside the astronauts,” he said. Felix Lajeunesse, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Felix and Paul Studios.
“Everything will be done remotely and astronauts won’t really have to worry about the camera,” he said. “We’ll bring the camera relatively close to workplaces … so that once you’re immersed in virtual reality, you feel like you’re there with them, you feel like a participant in the action.”
Additionally, Estée Lauder is paying NASA to transport 10 containers of the New Advanced Night Repair Serum for a planned photo shoot on social media. The station crew will photograph containers of the company’s Advanced Night Repair cream as they float in the multi-window dome compartment against the blue and white background of Earth.
The project is part of an ongoing NASA campaign to encourage greater private sector use of low Earth orbit. According to Bloomberg, the company is paying NASA $ 128,000 for the out-of-this-world photoshoot.
“It’s not really some kind of shoot (for) a commercial. These are just a few photos to be taken at the iconic dome that we will use on our social media platform,” said Stéphane de La Faverie, Group President Estée Companies Lauder.
Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial space flight development, said the station’s astronauts will not appear in the photoshoot.
“The rules for astronauts, they can facilitate the photo session, they can take the pictures as part of their official duties, but they cannot be seen in the shots,” he said. “And they are not going to receive any additional compensation. Ethics rules prohibit them from doing that. We pay them their wages.”
The latest in a series of launch attempts
The planned launch of Antares Tuesday night followed two scrublands in Florida for the final 20 seconds of two countdowns approximately nine hours apart.
A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket carrying a classified spy satellite from the National Reconnaissance Office was grounded just seven seconds before liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Wednesday night due to a non-issue. specified. It is not known when ULA might make another attempt.
Launching a SpaceX Falcon 9 with another batch of Starlink Internet Satellites it was aborted 18 seconds before liftoff from Kennedy Space Center Thursday morning due to unusual sensor readings on a ground support system.
SpaceX plans another launch of Falcon 9 on Friday at 9:43 p.m., from a different platform, to put a navigation satellite of the US Space Force Global Positioning System into orbit. According to an updated weather forecast from the Air Force, the Starlink flight could get another shot Saturday morning.
