The two-stage rocket Antares  was  produced for the US Northrop Grumman resupply mission in partnership with the SE Pivdenne and several other Ukrainian companies.

The NASA automated cargo freighter was loaded with 3,723 kilograms of supplies and experiments.

The Cygnus mission was named the “S.S. Ellison Onizuka” after one of the astronauts who died in the space shuttle Challenger accident.

The NASA automated cargo freighter was loaded with 3,723 kilograms of supplies and experiments.

The cargo  aboard the Cygnus spacecraft includes a 3-D printing  technology demonstration, developed by Redwire for trial manufacture of mimic lunar soil in space.The material samples printed during the tech demo will be returned to Earth for analysis.

Future lunar explorers could manufacture their own hardware instead of bringing materials from Earth, or relying on costly cargo shipments.

The NG-16 mission is also set to  deliver spare parts for the space station’s equipment and support systems.

The Cygnus spacecraft will also  deliver a “mod kit” to configure the space station’s solar power truss for the arrival of the next pair of new roll-out solar arrays in late 2022, which will eventually help to expand the lab’s power generation capability for another decade of operations.

Other payloads  included a biomedical research investigation looking at muscle loss in microgravity, and an experiment to test a more efficient thermal control system that could be used to dissipate heat on future spacecraft.

The Cygnus resupply mission, named NG-16, will be the 16th cargo delivery to the space station by a Cygnus supply ship since 2013. It will be the 15th launch of an Antares rocket, which has suffered only one failure on its prior 14 missions.