#oa9

Aka Antares. It is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, and the moniker chosen by Orbital ATK for their rocket for NASA missions to the ISS.

I was somehow fortunate to witness OA-9, its ninth incarnation, light off from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

I wish I could give you the significance of its name, but after witnessing a 4:44am launch, I’m at a loss for words (unusual for my tag, I know).

When you’re outside in the viewing area, the tension for outsiders is palpable. Everyone is nervously laughing, hearts on edge. I felt like I was in the locker room before a big game but they didn’t let you out for warm ups.

Then before you know it you’re T-60. Everyone hears it over the loudspeaker and a slight hush falls. T-30. Everyone edges together and closer toward the launchpad, as if the 10 extra feet will give you a better view from 2 miles away.

T-10 is snapped through the quickest you could ever dream, and against rationality, a column of fire and fury starts lifting a 14-story structure into the air.

The light hits you first, then the crackling and rumbling of the engines firing. Its thrust illuminates the low clouds surrounding the spaceport and then pierces through them. Then the pressure wave thumps against your bones as the stages burn, and a once grounded star charges after its sister that passed before.

But this is is not the fire and fury of presidential warnings. The star that Anatares chases is the International Space Station, and it chases to deliver science. Little packages of human intuition saying, “I wonder what happens when” (except in space). It delivers the curiosity of humanity. It delivers letters from home. And when it completes its mission, it does one other useful thing: it takes the trash away.

That such awesome power is used to deliver packages to multi-national scientists in the sky was nothing short of emotional to me. 

I shouted “god-fucking-speed” like some melodramatic actor.

...basically, go see a rocket launch. 

The next one is a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch on June 1 from Cape Canaveral. And it’s another night launch. 

S.S. J.R. Thompson launches towards space station on OA-9 mission.

Orbital ATK successfully launched their ninth contracted cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station earlier this morning with a predawn liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia.  The Antares 230 launch vehicle lifted off from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at 4:44am EDT. After nine minutes of powered flight, the Cygnus spacecraft reached orbit with 7,400 pounds of cargo. 

Among the items being delivered to the space station is an experiment by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory called the Cold Atom Laboratory, which will attempt to cool an atom to just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the absolute coldest that an object could be. Also launched was an experiment to monitor the behavior of concrete in microgravity which could help engineers construct more resilient planetary habitats.

Sixteen bread loaf-sized cubists were launched, ten for transfer to the ISS for deployment and six for launch from Cygnus itself following the end of its resupply run in July.

Cygnus will arrive at the orbiting laboratory at 5:20am Thursday morning to begin a nearly two-month stay. Towards the end of its mission, Cygnus will perform a reboot maneuver to boost the space station into a higher orbit. This will be the first time a commercial cargo vehicle will boost the laboratory; currently, only Russian Progress freighters have the ability to boost the station.

Click here for all our Antares and Cygnus mission coverages.