Administrator Charles Bolden On Hand For Opening Ceremony
A formal dedication ceremony was held Monday marking the
completion of Orbital Sciences Corporation's new Mission Operations
Center (MOC). The facility will serve as the operations
center for the company’s cargo logistics missions to the
International Space Station (ISS) for NASA that begins in 2011. The
ribbon-cutting event was attended by NASA’s Administrator
Charles F. Bolden, Jr. and several other senior representatives of
the space agency.
Orbital MOC
After nearly three years of developing the Taurus II rocket and
the Cygnus spacecraft, we are less than a year away from our first
scheduled launch to the ISS,” said Mr. David W. Thompson,
Orbital’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “The
Mission Operations Center dedicated to the COTS and CRS programs is
a critical element in our overall system architecture, providing us
with robust command and control systems for the upcoming missions,
as well as providing direct connectivity capabilities with our
Houston-based customers at NASA’s Johnson Space
Center.”
While at Orbital’s Dulles, VA facilities, the NASA
delegation viewed a full-scale mock-up of the Cygnus spacecraft,
which will carry essential cargo to the ISS following its launch
aboard Orbital’s Taurus II rocket from the Wallops Flight
Facility in Eastern Virginia. In addition, Administrator Bolden and
the other NASA officials toured Orbital’s Mission Control
Complex, which includes three additional MOCs that support the
company’s extensive manifest of other satellite and launch
vehicle missions. The delegation also visited Orbital’s
satellite manufacturing facility, at which four NASA scientific
satellites – Glory, NuSTAR, OCO-2 and GEMS – are in
various stages of design, production and testing by the
company’s technical operations team.
NASA Administrator Bolden
Under a 2008 cooperative research and development agreement with
NASA in its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS)
program, Orbital is developing a new autonomous spacecraft and
related launch vehicle and ground infrastructure for the delivery
of cargo and supplies to the ISS. The COTS program encompasses the
full-scale development and flight demonstration of a commercial
cargo delivery system that consists of a Taurus II medium-class
space launch vehicle, a Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft, and
ground-based command and control systems.
With the award of the $1.9 billion Commercial Resupply Services
(CRS) contract in late 2008, NASA selected Orbital to carry out
eight cargo logistics missions to the ISS from 2011 to 2015. For
NASA, CRS will provide an automated cargo delivery service,
produced and operated in the United States, for ISS logistics
support. The new system will complement Russian, European and
Japanese ISS cargo vehicles.