On April 17 at 23:46 Kyiv time (16:46 a.m Eastern) successful launch of Antares rocket took place from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island (Virginia, the United States), it orbited cargo vehicle Cygnus to deliver 3750 kg of payload to the International Space Station as ordered by NASA, payload includes supplies of food and equipment for the crew, equipment and materials for scientific experiments, equipment for station and spacewalk, computer and accessories, as well as two research cubesats – CAPSat and HARP. Cygnus and ISS docking is scheduled for April 19.

Prime developer of the Antares rocket is the US corporation Northrop Grumman. Cargo vehicle Cygnus is dubbed NG-11 Roger B. Chaffee in the honor of US astronaut Roger Bruce Chaffee.

Core structure of the Antares’ Stage 1 was developed and produced by Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye State Design Office and Yuzhmash Machine Building plant in cooperation with Ukraine’s Hartron-Arkos (Kharkov), Hartron-Ucom (Zaporozhie), Chezara, Rapid (Chernigov) and Kievpribor (Kiev) etc.

Antares pre-launch processing, testing and launch were supported by the Ukrainian specialists. Launch technical support, real-time acquisition and processing of the telemetry information were provided from the Yuzhnoye SDO territory as stipulated by the contract.

For this Antares mission for the first time the late loading technology was employed. Before the ship was loaded roughly 4 days prior to the launch. With this new technology, the loading time shortened down to 24 hours.

Since 2013 Antares rocket was launched 10 times, 9 of which being successful.

Under Antares program Ukrainian party has accomplished all the design, test and Stage 1 Core Structure hardware production liabilities undertaken under the contract with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Antares project is a good example of the Ukrainian space industry involvement in the international space projects, successful activity in the global space market.