Northrop Grumman: Artemis II & NG‑24

Northrop Grumman is tying two April 2026 space milestones together: NASA’s Artemis II crew returned safely to Earth on April 10, and the company’s Cygnus XL cargo ship launched toward the International Space Station on April 11. (nasa.gov) Artemis II was NASA’s first crewed Artemis flight, sending Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon and back on an approximately 10-day mission. NASA said Orion lifted off on April 1 and was scheduled to splash down off San Diego at about 8:07 p.m. Eastern on Friday, April 10. (nasa.gov) Northrop Grumman’s part of Artemis II was mostly at the front end of the mission, not the ocean recovery. The company says its twin five-segment solid rocket boosters supplied 75% of the Space Launch System rocket’s thrust at liftoff, and it also built abort-system motors designed to pull the crew capsule away in an emergency. (northropgrumman.com) A splashdown is the water landing at the end of a capsule mission, when the spacecraft hits the ocean under parachutes and recovery ships move in. NASA says Artemis II was a test of how Orion and its systems work with astronauts aboard in deep space, ahead of later lunar missions. (nasa.gov) The cargo mission is a different part of Northrop Grumman’s space business: routine station resupply. NASA said Cygnus XL launched at 7:41 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, April 11, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying about 11,000 pounds of science, supplies, and equipment. (nasa.gov) Cygnus XL is the larger version of Northrop Grumman’s cargo craft, built to haul more material to orbit. NASA said NG-24 is the second flight of that larger model, and astronauts are scheduled to use the Canadarm2 robotic arm to capture it on April 13 before attaching it to the station’s Unity module for unloading. (nasa.gov) The station flight also carries research tied to future exploration beyond low Earth orbit. NASA said the load includes a new module for the Cold Atom Lab, which studies matter at extremely low temperatures and supports research connected to general relativity, planetary composition, and dark matter. (nasa.gov) Cygnus has become a long-running logistics line for the orbiting lab. Northrop Grumman says the spacecraft has delivered more than 159,000 pounds of equipment, science experiments, and crew supplies to the International Space Station over more than 10 years of Commercial Resupply Services work. (northropgrumman.com) Taken together, the two updates show Northrop Grumman spanning NASA’s moon program and its station supply chain in the same weekend: one mission ended in the Pacific, and the next headed for orbit from Florida. (northropgrumman.com)