An Antares rocket has launched Cygnus towards the International Space Station (Image: NASA)

Ants, antibiotics and a fleet of tiny satellites are heading to the International Space Station (ISS), following the successful launch of the commercial Cygnus craft today.

As well as being Cygnus’s first official ISS mission, the launch should herald a boom in the scientific and commercial exploitation of low Earth orbit.

Cygnus, which took off from Wallops, Virginia at 1.07pm local time, is operated by the private company Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Virginia. Last September, Orbital became the second private firm to send a craft to dock with the ISS, while its rival, SpaceX, is already conducting regular ISS resupply launches.


Assuming it reaches the ISS without any problems, NASA now has a choice of two delivery firms – a boon to companies operating from there. “The more ways to get there the better. It’s similar to having multiple companies competing for freight delivery, like Fed Ex and UPS along with the postal service,” says Rich Pournelle of NanoRacks, a company based in Houston, Texas, that leases space and equipment on the ISS and sells access to other customers.

CubeSat imaging

One of those customers is Planet Labs based in San Francisco, California, which has a fleet of 28 small satellites, dubbed Flock 1, packed onboard Cygnus. Called CubeSats, these satellites are just tens of centimetres across and will be launched from the ISS in groups over the course of a week, forming a network around Earth. Planet Labs then plans to sell rapidly updated satellite images of Earth’s surface to help with disaster relief or crop monitoring, for example.

NanoRacks customers have launched a handful of CubeSats from the ISS before but these were on a much smaller scale and didn’t work together as a group. “Flock 1 will be the first commercial constellation of satellites to be launched from the ISS,” says Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen. A number of other customers have CubeSats going up on Cygnus as well.

The chain of private firms involved in deploying the CubeSats demonstrates how business on the ISS is starting to take off. “It is a further development towards role separation between the public infrastructure owner-operators [like NASA] and commercial service providers,” says Greg Sadlier, space analyst at consultancy firm London Economics.

Ants in space

“This is another signal of the intensifying use of low Earth orbit,” agrees John Hickman, a political scientist at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. But he notes that it is important to remember the ISS was built with public money: “You will search in vain for an orbiting private sector space station.”

Cygnus is also carrying a number of NASA-funded science experiments. One highlight is Ants in Space, a school project to put a small ant colony in orbit so that children on the ground can monitor a video feed to determine how the insects’ behaviour changes in microgravity. Another will look at the effectiveness of antibiotics in space, which could help treat future astronauts as well as provide data about antibiotic resistance here on Earth.

The Orbital launch had been delayed for weeks. The first hurdle came in December when emergency repairs to the ISS pushed back the launch date. It was then further delayed by cold weather on the ground in the US and a solar flare, which threatened to interfere with the spacecraft’s navigation systems. “It is a delay, but it’s only a delay in the success that will come as a result of this mission,” said Orbital’s Frank Culbertson in a press conference earlier this week.

The increased frequency of launches to the ISS enabled by SpaceX and Orbital should up the number of orbiting experiments, as well as increase timeliness and build redundancy into the system – if an experiment fails, researchers can just send up another on the next delivery.

And with the White House announcing plans to extend ISS funding by another four years, which would extend its lifetime to 2024, there is more than enough time for both commerce and science to flourish. “We see it as a very good sign for the future of the ISS,” says Pournelle.