Cygnus NG-21

NG-21 is the twenty-first planned flight of the Cygnus robotic resupply spacecraft and its eighteenth flight to the International Space Station (ISS). It is planned to launch in August 2024. It is contracted to Northrop Grumman under the Commercial Resupply Services II (CRS-2) contract with NASA. The capsule is scheduled to be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems) and NASA jointly developed a new space transportation system to provide commercial cargo resupply services to the International Space Station (ISS). Under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, Orbital ATK designed, acquired, built, and assembled the Cygnus, an advanced spacecraft using a Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) provided by industrial partner Thales Alenia Space and a Service Module based on the Orbital GEOStar satellite bus.

NG-21 is the second launch of a Cygnus spacecraft after the exhaustion of the supply of Antares rockets, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, losing both the Russian rocket engine supplier and the Ukrainian booster stage supplier. A Northrop Grumman replacement for Antares will later come about for later missions. The next Cygnus missions will also use Falcon 9, and subsequent mission will use the next-generation Antares 300 series that does not depend on Ukrainian or Russian parts.

History
Cygnus NG-21 is the tenth Cygnus mission under the Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract.

Production and integration of Cygnus spacecraft are performed in Dulles, Virginia. The Cygnus service module is mated with the pressurized cargo module at the launch site, and mission operations are conducted from control centers in Dulles, Virginia and Houston, Texas.

Spacecraft
This will be the sixteenth flight of the Enhanced-sized Cygnus PCM.

Manifest
The Cygnus spacecraft will be loaded with cargo and supplies before its launch.