Northrop Grumman developed the Cygnus advanced maneuvering spacecraft to demonstrate cargo delivery services under a NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Space Act Agreement. Northrop Grumman uses Cygnus to perform International Space Station resupply flights under the Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) contract. Northrop Grumman is under contract to conduct 10 missions to deliver approximately 28,700 kilograms of cargo to the ISS. The first of these was successfully completed in early 2014.

The Cygnus system is a low-risk design incorporating elements drawn from Northrop Grumman and its partners’ existing, flight-proven spacecraft technologies. Cygnus consists of a common service module and a pressurized cargo module. Cygnus is used to carry crew supplies, spare equipment and scientific experiments to the ISS.

The service module incorporates avionics systems from Northrop Grumman’s flight-proven LEOStar™ and GEOStar™ satellite product lines plus propulsion and power systems from our GEOStar communications satellites.

The pressurized cargo module is based on the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), developed by Thales Alenia Space for NASA.