Northrop Grumman launched another ISS cargo mission on SpaceX's rocket this week. That sentence is not supposed to be unremarkable.
The company's Cygnus XL spacecraft, the larger of the two current configurations, lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral at 7:41 a.m. EDT on Saturday, Space.com reported, carrying roughly 11,000 pounds of supplies and scientific equipment for the Expedition 74 crew aboard the International Space Station. This was NG-24. It was the second flight of the XL variant, which debuted on NG-23 in September 2025, and it was the sixth consecutive Cygnus mission to fly on a SpaceX rocket rather than Northrop Grumman's own Antares.
The Antares program has had a difficult decade. In October 2014, an Antares 130 carrying the Cygnus Orb-3 cargo vehicle exploded seconds after liftoff from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, destroying the spacecraft and damaging the launch pad infrastructure, according to Wikipedia. The accident traced back to the rocket's first-stage engines, a variant of the Soviet-era NK-33 designed and built in Russia and Ukraine. That disaster, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic's disruption of supply chains and geopolitical tensions over Ukrainian-sourced components, led Orbital ATK (later Northrop Grumman) to ground the Antares 100 and 200 series. The newer Antares 230 and 230+ flew from 2016 through 2023 but were ultimately retired with no immediate replacement. Since August 2023, every Cygnus mission has flown on someone else's rocket.
Northrop Grumman is not a small company. It builds launch vehicles, orbital platforms, missile defense systems, and satellites. Yet for its own cargo spacecraft, it has been dependent on SpaceX since 2024. The company is developing the Antares 300 with Firefly Aerospace, and in May 2025 Northrop Grumman invested $50 million in Firefly to support the program, Wikipedia records. The first combined flight is planned for 2027, and it will use Firefly's first stage with Northrop Grumman's upper stage and avionics. Until then, Falcon 9 is the only way to fly Cygnus.
The practical consequence is that a company with a stated launch vehicle program is writing checks to its competitor for every orbital cargo delivery it needs. That is a meaningful dependency for a company that built its identity around vertical integration in space systems.
The XL configuration does bring genuine upgrades. The extended Cygnus carries up to 5,000 kilograms of payload, roughly 20 percent more than the Enhanced variant it supersedes, in a spacecraft that stretches to eight meters long. It can support late cargo loading closer to launch than previous versions and can perform orbital reboost of the ISS after undocking. These are real improvements. But none of them change who puts the spacecraft into orbit.
There is a parallel with Boeing's Starliner situation: a company that built the hardware finding itself dependent on a competitor's vehicle to complete its own mission. The difference is that Northrop Grumman appears to have made peace with the arrangement, at least for now. NG-23 flew on Falcon 9. NG-24 flew on Falcon 9. Until Antares 300 is ready, there is no alternative on the shelf.
For the ISS crew, none of this matters. The cargo arrives. The Cold Atom Lab gets its upgrade. The European exercise device arrives intact. But the story of who is actually flying what, and why, is a supply chain story that has been building for over a decade. Saturday's launch is the latest chapter.
