Capsules

CYGNUS NG-24

US Cargo Spacecraft (ISS Resupply — Cygnus XL) · Northrop Grumman / NASA

The S.S. Steven R. Nagel launched April 11, 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 — a detail that still feels faintly absurd for a Northrop Grumman spacecraft, but Cygnus lost its own Antares rocket in 2022 when the war in Ukraine cut off the Russian-built engines it depended on, and has been hitching rides on its competitor's rockets ever since. Named for astronaut Steven Nagel, who flew four Space Shuttle missions before his death in 2014, NG-24 delivered 11,000 pounds of cargo and science experiments to the station. For a few days in April, five different spacecraft were parked at the ISS simultaneously — Crew Dragon, Cygnus, a Soyuz, and two Progress vehicles — a genuinely crowded orbital parking lot representing four different countries' space programs docked to one station at once.