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NASA Astronaut Rick Mastracchio will visit Orbital Sciences Corporation at 1:30 p.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 15, where he will hold a town hall meeting with the company’s team that carries out cargo delivery missions to the International Space Station under the agency's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract.

Media are invited to attend the event at Orbital’s Dulles campus, located at 45101 Warp Drive in Dulles, Virginia.

While at Orbital, Mastracchio will view several Cygnus spacecraft service modules in production and visit the Mission Operations Center from which Orbital’s CRS missions are controlled.

In the first of its eight operational missions under the CRS contract, Orbital successfully berthed its Cygnus spacecraft with the International Space Station on Jan. 12, carrying about 3,200 pounds of science experiments, food and other supplies to the station astronauts. Cargo resupply from U.S. companies ensures a national capability to deliver critical science research to the space station, significantly increasing NASA's ability to conduct new science investigations to the only laboratory in microgravity.

Media interested in attending should submit their credentials to Barron Beneski at 703-406-5528 or beneski.barron@orbital.com no later than 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 11.

For more information on Orbital, visit:

http://www.orbital.com

For more information on Orbital's role in NASA's Commercial Cargo Program, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/orbital

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