Cygnus

But SpaceX does three on Cargo Dragon.

Orbital ATK does three with Cygnus.

And JAXA has one HTV delivery.

So a total of, what is that, 12.

Sometimes it is a SpaceX Dragon carrying food, science experiments, spare parts and small treats.

Sometimes it is a Northrop Grumman Cygnus, sometimes it is a Russian Progress.

The crew looks forward to these deliveries the way sailors used to look forward to port.

Fresh fruit arrives, new shirts, handwritten letters from families, rebuilt exercise equipment, whatever the station's carefully monitored inventory has begun to run low on shows up on schedule or close to schedule.

Our final story floats above our planet, where the International Space Station circles Earth again and again.

NASA said Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo craft fired its engines for 20 minutes and 43 seconds to raise the space station's orbit.

That means the cargo ship gave the station a carefully planned push.

Why would a space station need a boost? Even though the station is in space, it is not completely free from Earth's atmosphere.

Think of it like giving a playground swing a gentle push at the right time.

Except the swing is a giant science lab, the push comes from rocket engines, and everything is happening high above Earth.

The Cygnus XL is a cargo craft, which means it can bring supplies and equipment to the station.

In this case, it also helped adjust the station's orbit.

We're still not getting to commercial crew.

But in 2017, SpaceX flies the station four times with Cargo Dragon and Orbital ATK, which is now part of Northrop Grumman, flew twice with their vehicle, the Cygnus vehicle.

So that's six compared to three Progress and one HTV.

So the amount of resupply of the stations remains the same.

And, you know, what we mean about, you know, on orbit labor is it's everything from cargo logistics.

So when a Cygnus vehicle comes up with three and a half tons of cargo, you got to move that from the Cygnus vehicle into the ISS, put it in stowage, then unpack it, then grab the experiment, set the experiment up, and then you can do it.

So we've heard anecdotally from ops planners and NASA and people like that, out of the two hours set up for an experiment, it can take the first hour and 30 minutes just getting the things that you need to carry that out.

And so when we heard about that and you see the economy growing like it is with things that are created in space and microgravity, like pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, fiber optics, all these amazing things, you start to wonder how efficient can we be here and how can we make those astronauts not feel like Amazon warehouse workers, but the true cutting edge scientists that they are.

SpaceX's Dragon flies cargo up and down today.

Northrop Grumman's Cygnus flies cargo up today.

Dream Chaser is arriving into a party that's already in full swing, and it has to justify why a runway landing space plane is worth the added complexity when a capsule is already getting the job done.

The gentle return, land at a runway advantage is real, but it's a niche advantage, and niches have to prove they pay.