Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft successfully reinforces the International Space Station

After a suc­cess­ful attempt to launch the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion to a high­er orbit ear­li­er this week, Northrop Grum­man’s Cygnus NG-17 space­craft burst into flames dur­ing a con­trolled, destruc­tive descent.

The Cygnus space­craft — whose offi­cial name is SS Piers sell­er, after the late NASA astro­naut and cli­ma­tol­o­gist – docked at the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS) on Feb­ru­ary 21. At the time, she was car­ry­ing more than 8,300 lb (3,760 kg) of pro­vi­sions, car­go, sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ments, and oth­er sup­plies. The SS Piers Sell­ers even brought a lithi­um-ion sec­ondary bat­tery to the ISS demon­stra­tion and a new sys­tem designed to test a range of hydro­pon­ic and aero­pon­ic tech­niques in microgravity.

The unmanned resup­ply ship Northrop Grum­man left the ISS at 7:05 a.m. EDT (1105 GMT) on Tues­day. After clear­ance from the sta­tion’s Canadarm 2 robot, Cygnus per­formed the rest of its work in LEO (Low Earth Orbit). It also deployed a num­ber of Cube­Sats for NASA before begin­ning its descent.

The ship had a destruc­tive re-entry last night (June 29). This means that Cygnus com­plete­ly burned up along with its car­go of ISS debris dur­ing its descent.

Cygnus undocked from the ISS about an hour lat­er than NASA orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed. NASA offi­cials explained that the delay pre­vent­ed encoun­ters with space debris. Addi­tion­al­ly, Northrup Grum­man said the extra hour was enough to put Cygnus in a bet­ter phys­i­cal posi­tion for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with its ground-based controllers.

Progress Indeed

Ever since Putin invad­ed Ukraine, the glob­al space com­mu­ni­ty has made an uncom­fort­able mess. While the ISS is tech­ni­cal­ly a joint endeav­or of all space agen­cies involved, Russ­ian inno­va­tion and hard­ware is doing a lot of the work up there in LEO. So much heavy lift­ing, in fact, that the ISS has so far relied on Rus­si­a’s Progress space­craft to restart orbit. But you know that old duck about progress being the oppo­site of con­gress? Progress in this case is the oppo­site of progress.

The geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions in the for­mer East­ern Bloc do not appear to be eas­ing any time soon. On the con­trary, Putin has dou­bled and tripled his expan­sion­ist rhetoric, even as the “denaz­i­fi­ca­tion” nar­ra­tive falls apart with­in its own con­fines. Worse, Roscos­mos has tak­en a delib­er­ate­ly hos­tile stance. Rus­sia has for­mal­ly with­drawn inter­na­tion­al access to its Soyuz rock­ets, expelled ESA staff from coop­er­a­tive launch sites and sus­pend­ed inter­na­tion­al oper­a­tions at its Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Mov­ing away from reliance on Russ­ian launch vehi­cles was a NASA pri­or­i­ty long before this year’s inva­sion. As we dis­cussed ear­li­er, NASA’s Com­mer­cial Car­go and Com­mer­cial Crew pro­grams court sev­er­al domes­tic space com­pa­nies. The hope is that every­thing will go well togeth­er. While NASA is pur­su­ing its direc­tion of open­ing up low-Earth orbit to com­mer­cial inter­ests, the agency can also draw on a num­ber of domes­tic rock­et part­ners to launch var­i­ous pay­loads into space.