SEATTLE — Northrop Grumman is planning upgrades to its Cygnus cargo vehicle, equivalent to increased payload capability, to support each the International Space Station and future industrial space stations.
In presentations on the International Space Station Research and Development Conference Aug. 2, company representatives outlined efforts to boost the capabilities of the decade-old spacecraft to enable it to serve NASA and others in the approaching decade.
“We’re what we’ve got to do with the Cygnus spacecraft, what we’ve got to do with the services that it provides,” said Rick Mastracchio, director of strategy and business development at Northrop Grumman Space Systems. “We’re trying to organize and think way ahead on how can we start updating the vehicle, ensuring we’ve got a spacecraft that might be flying 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”
Amongst those changes is increased payload capability. The present version of the Cygnus can carry abut 3,750 kilograms of pressurized cargo to the station. An upgraded version in development will increase that to five,000 kilograms, said Lucas Migliorini, cargo logistics development engineering manager at Northrop Grumman, in one other conference presentation.
The “Mission B” version of Cygnus stretches the payload module of the spacecraft by 1.5 meters to accommodate the extra cargo. That version of Cygnus is scheduled to make its first flight on the NG-23 cargo mission, currently planned for launch in mid-2025. It is going to even be the primary launch of the brand new Antares 330 with increased payload performance to accommodate the larger Cygnus.
One other change into consideration is how Cygnus attaches to the space station. The spacecraft is currently berthed to the station by Canadarm2 robotic arm, reasonably than actively dock to the station like SpaceX’s current version of the Dragon spacecraft.
“Particularly for industrial space stations, a giant focus at once is on docking,” Migliorini said. Berthing requires a robotic arm, and a few industrial stations may not have an acceptable robotic arm, a minimum of of their initial configurations.
Northrop can also be emphasizing the flexibility of Cygnus to reboost the orbit of the ISS and potentially other stations. That has been tested on the ISS on previous Cygnus missions and might be demonstrated again on the NG-19 Cygnus, launched Aug. 1 and scheduled to reach on the station early Aug. 4.
“We prefer to find a way to do a few these per mission,” Migliorini said of reboost maneuvers. Those reboosts are done using propellant not needed for the spacecraft’s arrival on the station.
Northrop Grumman is leveraging Cygnus in other ways. The spacecraft is a key a part of its proposed industrial space station, one in every of three that won funded Space Act Agreements in late 2021 through NASA’s Business LEO Destinations program for initial design work. The corporate received a separate unfunded Space Act Agreement in June for a “Persistent Platform” version of Cygnus designed to host uncrewed payloads that enhances its station.
“Our strategy is to utilize hardware that we’ve got already been working on,” Mastracchio said, that features each Cygnus and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module Northrop is constructing for the lunar Gateway. “We’re attempting to reuse as much of that hardware as possible to maintain additional non-recurring engineering costs low.”
The corporate is offering Cygnus to other corporations working on industrial space stations. “We’re talking to all of the potential Business LEO Destination providers, all of the industrial space station providers,” he said. Those discussions include determining what services that Cygnus offers the ISS that will not be needed for industrial stations in addition to recent services that Cygnus could offer those future stations.
Cygnus made its first flight to the ISS on an indication mission in September 2013 and NG-19 is the 20th Cygnus launched to this point, including one lost in an Antares launch failure in October 2014. Migliorini said the corporate is studying doubling the present Cygnus production rate of two vehicles a yr to fulfill the needs of economic stations.