Updated 11 a.m. Eastern with Northrop Grumman statement.
WASHINGTON — NASA and Northrop Grumman will not launch a Cygnus cargo mission to the International Space Station in June as previously planned after discovering the spacecraft is damaged.
In a statement March 26, NASA said the Pressurized Cargo Module for the Cygnus that was to fly the NG-22 mission to the ISS is damaged and will not be used for that mission, which was to launch in June. NASA said the next Cygnus mission will be NG-23, planned for no earlier than this fall.
“The pressurized cargo module for Northrop Grumman’s NG-22 Cygnus cargo resupply mission was damaged while in transit from the supplier to Northrop Grumman,” company spokesman Dan Leone said in a statement to SpaceNews March 27. “Possible effects to the NG-22 mission timeline are being evaluated. Meanwhile, we are working to expedite the hardware for NG-23 to support a launch as early as fall 2025. Our highest priority is to safely deliver cargo and supplies to the International Space Station crew as planned.”
NASA warned three weeks earlier of the potential for damage to the spacecraft after Northrop reported its module’s shipping contained was damaged in what the company called a “commercial shipping accident” during transit to the launch site. The agency said then it would adjust the cargo manifest for the next Dragon mission to the station, SpX-32, replacing some science investigations with crew supplies and station hardware in the event NG-22 was delayed.
“The big challenge for us is when our flights start to shift around,” Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program manager, said at a March 7 briefing. She noted NG-22 was previously scheduled to launch in February but delayed by an avionics issue that neither NASA nor Northrop Grumman had widely publicized.
“If we’re going to have another shift of our cargo missions, I’ve got to adjust and accommodate more food,” she said of the decision to replace research payloads with consumables on SpX-32. That cargo Dragon mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than April 21.
NASA said in its statement that it will work with Northrop “to assess whether the Cygnus cargo module is able to safely fly to the space station on a future flight.”
The agency has not disclosed how much research would be removed from SpX-32 to accommodate additional consumables. The previous cargo Dragon mission, SpX-31 in November, carried 961 kilograms of crew supplies and 917 kilograms of science investigations. SpX-30 in March 2024 carried 545 kilograms of crew supplies and 1,135 kilograms of science investigations.
Both Northrop Grumman and SpaceX have been transporting cargo to and from the station under a series of contracts dating back to 2008. A third company, Sierra Space, also has a Commercial Resupply Services contract for cargo transportation but has yet to fly its Dream Chaser vehicle after extensive delays.
“We’re looking towards the end of summer right now” for the first Dream Chaser launch, said Erik Daehler, vice president of defense, satellites and spacecraft systems at Sierra Space, during a panel at the Satellite 2025 conference March 10. That timeline, he said, depends on the ISS schedule of visiting vehicles as well as “final closeouts” and testing of Dream Chaser. “We’re excited about our first flight this year.”
The Japanese space agency JAXA has also been working on HTV-X, an updated version of its HTV cargo vehicle for the station. The first HTV-X launch is projected for as soon as this fall.
The NG-21 Cygnus spacecraft has been at the station since August, arriving despite technical issues that delayed initial orbit-raising maneuvers. The station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm will unberth that Cygnus from the station early March 28, with a destructive reentry of the spacecraft scheduled for March 30.