Thanks for submitting this - given the nigh-eclipsing popularity of SpaceX on social networks I hadn't heard about this recent launch or Orbital's recent activity at all.
Competitors like Orbital deserve very little publicity. I know something about engineering practices at Orbital (my spouse used to work there) and they're just not comparable to SpaceX at all.
An engineering culture obsessed with never innovating. Do you know what happens when an Orbital engineer wants to verify that a satellite will have enough battery power throughout its lifetime even given eclipses? They copy an excel spreadsheet from a shared network drive that has the analysis for the last satellite they worked on. This spreadsheet performs numerical integration using recursive cell references. It takes several minutes for excel to crunch through it. Of course, it involves lots of complicated formulas that are easy to get wrong, especially given excel's interface (this is really, really not what excel was designed for), and you can't even use modern features of excel (like named cell references) because the group forbids their use since not everyone understands them. You can't write code either for the same reason. You certainly can't use matlab because that costs money and the company is unwilling to pay. When you do find defects in the spreadsheets (say, for example, when doing a power budget, the spreadsheet calculates current and tries to compare it to the max current available but someone screwed up and instead compared 1/current to the max current available), management will insist that you NOT go back and fix the bug in the older spreadsheets for satellite that have already flown: who cares whether or not they're going to fail in space, we've already shipped them!
Most of the aerospace industry is like this: it is filled with people who devote themselves to one singular goal: don't fuck up in a new way. You can fuck up, you can even do so catastrophically. That's allowed. But if you fail doing something new, your career will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Well, isn't that to be expected? It's a big company and seems NASA-y
I'm not a fan of Orbital either - thanks for sharing your insight though! - I think SpaceX's approach is far superior. But nonetheless, it's nice to hear about the competition occasionally, too.
I was curious when I saw that Cygnus was/will be destroyed on re-entry , while Dragon is reusable. I don't know anything about spacecraft, but that seems like a fundamental difference in engineering in favor of SpaceX
It's interesting how many unmanned resupply crafts there are for the ISS now. Russian Progress, European ATV, Japanese HTV and the Dragon. Now what is really needed is something manned to complement the Soyuz. SpaceX is aiming for it at least.
SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada Corp. SpaceX is certainly farthest along but the CST-100 is a fairly mature design as well, and SNC have already completed captive carry tests on DreamChaser test models. With any luck there may be 3 separate manned spacecraft being made by American companies within the next 5 years.
For orbital supplying cargo to ISS is a purely business decision. Make money doing it. Nothing wrong with that approach. It is clearly one reason why they are using 30+ year old stock of Russian engines for Antares. There is no reason for them to innovate.
On the other hand, for SpaceX, these are just milestones on the highway to much greater things, like Mars. Cue they build almost everything that makes up Falcon and Dragon in house. I will cheer SpaceX over Orbital for this one reason alone.
Another is that, according to the BBC website, "Upmass: 6t" for Dragon versus "Upmass: 2.7t" for Cygnus - a shade under half as much cargo carried to orbit.
