Orbital Science Corp will have to wait for another day after an umbilical came loose some 12 minutes before the scheduled launch time on April 17th, 2013.
The Antares rocket is a 13-story-tall booster designed to launch the company's new Cygnus spacecraft on unmanned cargo delivery missions to the International Space Station. Orbital has a $1.9 billion deal with NASA to fly eight cargo flights to the space station under the agency's Commercial Resupply Services program, but first needs to demonstrate that the two-stage Antares rocket is fit for those missions.
With the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in 2011, the space agency is depending on new commercial spacecraft like Orbital's Cygnus to keep the space station stocked with supplies.
NASA eventually plans to use private spaceships to ferry American astronauts to and from the space station as well.
Orbital Sciences is one of two companies with contracts to launch unmanned cargo delivery flights to the space station.
The other is Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif., which has a $1.6 billion deal to provide 12 cargo delivery missions using its Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon space capsules.
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