NASA Awards Space Cargo Grant

pha7boy writes "NASA has made a recent award of 171 million dollars to Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia in order to aid the company in developing a feasible space cargo delivery service. 'The US space agency intends to hold an open competition in the years ahead for actual space station cargo-delivery contracts, but Orbital of Dulles, VA, is one of two companies receiving financial help from NASA to develop their proposed systems. The other is Space Exploration Technologies of El Segundo, CA.'"

Comments

Re:What's wrong with ATV?

[PeterBrett]

I thought the whole idea of an *international* space station was that we didn't have to duplicate technology efforts between the partners? ESA developed the ATV for the express purpose of resupplying the ISS, so what's this duplicate piece of tech doing?

It's not duplicate of the ATV: AFAIK, it's intended for very urgent deliveries of small amounts critical supplies to ISS, where the ATV is designed for long-term scheduled deliveries of large amounts of day-to-day supplies.

The two problems are similar, but complementary.