It Was A GREAT Week For A Number Of Folks In The Commercial Space Transport Biz

After a week's delay in orbit due to software hiccups, Orbital's Cygnus vehicle successfully docked at the ISS.

The station's Expedition 37 crew reported the spacecraft -- loaded with about 1,300 pounds of cargo -- berthed Sunday morning at 8:44 a.m. EDT, following an 11-day journey to the orbiting laboratory. Cygnus had been scheduled for a rendezvous with the space station on Sept. 22.

Due to a data format mismatch, the first rendezvous attempt was postponed. Orbital updated and tested a software patch to fix the issue. Orbital's Cygnus was launched on the company's Antares rocket on Sept. 18 from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. This was the first flight of a spacecraft to the space station from the state. The capsule will remain attached to Harmony until a planned unberthing on Oct. 22 sends the spacecraft toward a destructive re-entry in Earth's atmosphere.

And a little closer to earth, at least for a little while, a much modified version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launched at Noon Sunday from Vandenberg AFB along the coast of California. A more larger powerful version of the now-experienced Falcon 9 launch vehicle placed a Canadian satellite into Earth orbit in what was labeled as a "nominal" launch.

With a number of micro-sats, as well as MDA Corp's science and comm sat, all the primary mission objectives appear to have been met handily... though some secondary objectives, including the reignition of the first stage propulsion system to learn to control the vehicle's descent in advance of SpaceX plans to eventually a fully recoverable launch system ran into issues that will require further test and evaluation.

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.orbital.com, www.spacex.com