The American company Firefly Aeroscape will supply the corporation's engines
NEW YORK, August 2. /tass/. The American corporation Northrop Grumman carried out the last launch of the Antares launch vehicle, the first stage of which is equipped with Russian RD-181 engines developed by NPO Energomash. Antares will launch the Cygnus spacecraft into near-Earth orbit, which will deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).
The launch of the launch vehicle took place on August 1 at 20:31 East coast time (03:31 Moscow Time on August 2) from the spaceport on Wallops Island (Virginia). Cygnus has about 3.7 tons of cargo on board, including food and equipment for scientific experiments. The cargo ship is expected to dock with the ISS on August 4 after 04:30 (11:30 Moscow time).
This is the 19th cargo delivery mission to the ISS, carried out by Northrop Grumman under contract with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It is expected that the device will stay in orbit for several months, and at the end of the mission it will take garbage and waste from the station and burn up in the dense layers of the atmosphere.
In March 2022, the ex-head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel that he had decided to stop all deliveries of rocket engines to the United States by NPO Energomash and to refuse maintenance of unused products left by the American side. It was about RD-180 and RD-181 engines for Atlas V and Antares launch vehicles, respectively. In turn, in August of the same year, Northrop Grumman entered into an agreement with the American company Firefly Aerospace to modernize the first stage of the Antares rocket and replace Russian engines with domestic ones.
Cargo is also delivered to orbit by SpaceX Dragon ships under a contract with NASA. Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin (TASS special correspondent on the ISS), Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, as well as an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates Sultan an-Neyadi are currently on watch on the ISS.