Derek Richardson

March 10th, 2017

Cygnus OA-7 / S.S. John Glenn. Photo Credit: Michael Howard / SpaceFlight Insider

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Orbital ATK announced that it has named the next Cygnus spacecraft to be sent to the International Space Station after former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn, who died on Dec. 8, 2016, at the age of 95.

The S.S. John Glenn will be launched during a 30-minute window that starts at 10:56 p.m. EDT March 19 (02:56 GMT March 20), 2017, atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. It will take about three days for the spacecraft to reach the ISS, where it will be captured by the stations robotic Canadarm2 to be berthed to the Earth-facing port of the Unity module.

S.S. John Glenn / Cygnus OA-7. Photo Credit: Michael Howard / SpaceFlight Insider

Orbital ATK names all of their ISS cargo freighters after former astronauts. The OA-7 mission is the second Cygnus to be named after a member of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, the previous was after Deke Slayton.

Other Cygnus have been named for George Low, Charles Fullerton, Janice Voss, Rick Husband, and Alan Poindexter, all of whom flew during the Space Shuttle program.

Glenn was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio. He was a decorated combat veteran of both World War II and the Korean War; in 1959, he was selected by NASA as part of the U.S. first set of astronauts.

Rocketing into the history books on Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Riding a Mercury-Atlas rocket, his one-man Friendship 7 capsule orbited the planet three times before splashing down in the North Atlantic Ocean.

After resigning from NASA in 1964, he went on to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio. However, an injury that year forced an early withdraw. He lost a close election for the same seat in 1970.

In 1974 he won his first election and served for 24 years. Glenn even had an unsuccessful bid for president in 1984.

While he was a Senator, he became the oldest person to fly in space at the age of 77 during Space Shuttle Discoverys STS-95 mission, a record that has yet to be broken. In October 1998, he spent just over nine days orbiting Earth. He was also the only member of the original Mercury astronauts to fly on the Space Shuttle.

Having an internal volume of 950 cubic feet (27 cubic meters), the 21-foot (6.4-meter) long, 10-foot (3.1-meter) wide craft will carry some 7,700 pounds (3,500 kilograms) of supplies and experiments for Expedition 50 and future ISS crews.

Among the experiments on board is the third Saffire payload. This flame experiment is part of an ongoing series to study the effects of fire in microgravity. It is the largest flame-experiment in the history of space exploration.

Saffire-III will be remotely activated after the cargo portion of the mission concludes, some 90-days after arriving at the ISS. Once Cygnus is unberthed and moved a safe distance away from the outpost, the experiment will be performed and results downloaded via telemetry before re-entering Earths atmosphere.

Also on boardthe S.S. John Glenn is the Reentry Data Collection (RED-Data-2) flight recorder. It will provide data about the conditions the spacecraft will encounter during its destructive re-entry.

Finally, a NanoRacks deployer on the exterior of the spacecraft will release a number of CubeSats.

When it launches, the OA-7 Cygnus will be the third to use a ULA Atlas V. It will fly out of Cape Canaveral Air Force Stations Space Launch Complex 41.

Cygnus OA-7 / S.S. John Glenn. Photo Credit: Michael Howard / SpaceFlight Insider

Tagged: Cygnus International Space Station Lead Stories NASA OA-7 Orbital ATK S.S. John Glenn

Derek Richardson is a student studying mass media with an emphasis in contemporary journalism at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. He is currently the managing editor of the student run newspaper, the Washburn Review. He also writes a blog, called Orbital Velocity, about the space station. His passion for space ignited when he watched space shuttle Discovery leap to space on Oct. 29, 1998. He saw his first in-person launch on July 8, 2011 when the space shuttle launched for the final time. Today, this fervor has accelerated toward orbit and shows no signs of slowing down. After dabbling in math and engineering courses in college, he soon realized that his true calling was communicating to others about space exploration and spreading that passion.

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Orbital ATK names next Cygnus after John Glenn - SpaceFlight Insider