Launch Roundup - Northrop Grumman prepare the first Cygnus to fly on Falcon 9 - NASASpaceFlight.com
Launch Roundup - Northrop Grumman prepare the first Cygnus to fly on Falcon 9 - NASASpaceFlight.com
www.nasaspaceflight.com
Launch Roundup - Northrop Grumman prepare the first Cygnus to fly on Falcon 9 - NASASpaceFlight.com
This is another case of SpaceX scooping up a contract because a launch vehicle isn't ready yet, isn't it? I assume Northrop Grumman would prefer to launch on their own Antares 330.
Also interesting to note the maintenance on JRTI. I wonder what work is being done?
I'll give them a bit of a pass on this for needing to suddenly retire the Antares 2xx and start the 3xx with Firefly in 2022. Hopefully the new one can be more competitive and launch something other than just Cygnus.
Props to SpaceX for having the launch capacity to fill the gap until Antares 330 is ready. In the meantime, the dissimilar redundancy that NASA wants is on hold for cargo delivery, at least until Dreamchaser goes up on a Vulcan.
I am looking forward to Dreamchaser. Is it launcher agnostic? It'd be funny (not necessarily ideal) if it ended up flying mainly on falcon as well