Antares rocket makes its maiden voyage into space

Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket had its first successful launch today, carrying a mock cargo ship into orbit before the rocket burned up in the atmosphere. It comes after two delays, for both weather and mechanical failure, but resulted in a strong showing for the Antares' two-stage booster engine, which utilizes a combination of liquid and solid fuels. Once testing is complete, the rocket is expected to take over resupply and crew launches to the International Space Station. The dummy cargo ship, which weighed over four tons, included three small Phonesat satellites as part of a NASA research experiment, as well as a larger Dove-1 satellite carried on behalf of telecom company Cosmogia.

It's part of a longterm shift at NASA from public missions to private contracts, which has also seen billion-dollar contracts for Elon Musk's SpaceX project project and a gradual phase-out of NASA's own space shuttle project. As one Nasa administrator told Space.com, "This is the culmination of a plan that we've been on for several years." With this successful launch behind them, Orbital Sciences is planning subsequent launches every three to six months, with two more scheduled for 2013 and at least one more mock-launch before they start ferrying actual cargo.

NASA Wallops rolls out the Antares for next week's test launch

WALLOPS ISLAND — The fully integrated Antares rocket was rolled out over the weekend to prepare for next week's long-awaited launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore. A 135-foot, medium-lift rocket, the Antares will be the largest ever to launch out of Wallops since the flight facility was established in 1945. The launch is set for 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, but NASA officials say the larger launch window is 5 to 8 p.m. that day through April 21.

The Antares and its Cygnus cargo spacecraft were developed and built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, a space transportation company based in Dulles, as part of its $1.9 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station through 2016. According to Orbital, the Antares is capable of lifting about 11,000 pounds of payload such as crew supplies and scientific experiments into low-earth orbit. "In layman's terms, a small-lift is a pickup truck, medium-lift is a semi and heavy-lift would be a train," said Dale K. Nash, executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority that oversees MARS. "That's a fairly significant step into that market," Nash said, "and resupplying the International Space Station is a very critical, very challenging mission."

According to Wallops Flight Facility spokesman Keith Koehler, about 100 media representatives, including social media and three international new organizations, have been credentialed so far to view the launch from Wallops. If it's successful, a mission later this year will launch the Cygnus to demonstrate it can rendezvous with the space station. If that succeeds, Orbital will conduct eight resupply missions out of MARS. State leaders hope having Orbital as a key customer will establish its spaceport as a major hub for the emerging commercial space industry, attract other commercial customers and bring investment and jobs to the state and region.

Orbital has said Antares launches will be visible throughout Hampton Roads, but the NASA Wallops website indicates two primary viewing locations for launches. One is at the Wallops Visitors Center along Virginia Highway 175, and the other is the beach on the Virginia side of Assateague Island, although capacity is based on such factors as the time of year and the state of the beach.