Orbital ATK Returns To Flight With Successful Antares Launch To Space Station (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Orbital ATK Antares rocket -- the same rocket that exploded on its way to the International Space Station two years ago -- returned to flight today with a much-anticipated launch. Lifting off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the Antares rocket is now on its way to deliver the Cygnus spacecraft filled with over 5,000 pounds of cargo to crew members aboard the ISS. Today's launch was particularly special for Orbital ATK, a company contracted by NASA to deliver 66,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS through 2018. After their Antares rocket exploded during a launch in 2014, destroying thousands of pounds of experiments and cargo bound for the space station, Orbital ATK worked for two years to upgrade that rocket and prepare for its return to flight. Today, the Orbital ATK was finally able to fly Cygnus on top of their own rocket again. The RD-181-equipped Antares rocket carried Cygnus, which housed science experiments and supplies for the ISS crew, for their fifth operational cargo resupply mission for NASA. Along with crew supplies, spacewalk equipment and computer resources, Cygnus will bring over 1,000 pounds of science investigations to the five crew members on the ISS. One of those experiments is Saffire-II, the second Saffire experiment to be conducted inside Cygnus in order to study realistic flame propagation in space. Cygnus will spend over a month attached to the ISS. In late November, the spacecraft will be filled with about 3,000 pounds of trash and then released to begin its descent back to Earth. During reentry through Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft, along with trash and Saffire-II, will be destroyed.

Comments

Re:Why dump the trash?

[Rei]

keep that stuff up there for a while

Yeah, they could just store it in all that extra space they don't have.

or hauling an equivalent mass of titanium, aluminium, whatsit next time it's needed?

1) The trash is mostly plastic

2) You seem to envision that there's some sort of little magical manufacturing box that takes random trash as inputs and produces random useful things engineered to spacecraft tolerances as outputs. The real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, trash is a jumbled mix of materials in an extremely wide range of forms, often inseparable, while manufacturing processes require carefully controlled input streams, which differ for each desired output product. Some random food pouch may be comprised of various bulk polymers like polyethylene, polypropylene, etc, with an aluminized EVOH lining or similar. Think you can break it back down into polyethylene beads, polypropylene beads, EVOH gel and aluminum dust? Yeah, good freaking luck with that.

I know it's popular in sci-fi circles to envision that it's cheaper to make things in space. But in the real world, it distinctly is not. Yes, launch costs are expensive, but even more expensive is labour in space and the engineering costs to make each potential type of new production system. Unlike in sci-fi, you can't just magick these things into existence.