After a number of delays, a Cygnus cargo ship began its three-day journey to the International Space Station on July 13 after a successful launch aboard Orbital Sciences Corp's fourth Antares rocket.
"It's a very exciting day for us," said Orbital Sciences vice president Frank Culbertson, according to Discovery News.
Culbertson is a former astronaut who spent four months aboard the space station in 2001.
The 13-story rocket launched at 12:52 p.m. EDT from the new Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.
"I think we found the secret to getting people's attention here on the eastern shore of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, and that's to launch on a Sunday in July," Culbertson said. "There's a lot of traffic out there right now."
The Cygnus capsule is scheduled to reach the space station sometime on July 16. Astronauts aboard the ISS will use the station's robotic arm to capture the capsule from orbit and bolt it to a docking port on the Harmony connecting module, according to Discovery.
The capsule was sent up with over 3,600 pounds of food, supplies, experiments and research equipment.
Research equipment includes 28 Earth-imaging CubeSats for San Francisco-based Planet Labs. The small satellites will be deployed by a specially made CubeSat launcher.
The custom-made launcher was prepared in Japan's Kibo laboratory module.
"It took a lot of effort for people to pull this off. We worked a lot of problems up to the last couple of months that had to be resolved. Even today, as we were working through the countdown, small things came up and people had to figure them out," Culbertson said.
Once Cygnus is unpacked, it will then be filled back up with trash and equipment no longer needed on the ISS.
In August, Cygnus will be released back into space and incinerate upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, according to Discovery.
The mission was originally scheduled for May, but had to be postponed due to conflicts with other launches and technical issues, including the failure of an AJ26 engine.
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