What NASA's next Cygnus cargo ship carries, and how it gets to the space station

NASA's next cargo delivery to the International Space Station is an uncrewed Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft, launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. In a November 2 media advisory, NASA said liftoff is targeted for no earlier than 10:49 a.m. EST on Sunday, November 29, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. That is 15:49 UTC by our conversion. NASA calls the flight its Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 25 mission, or CRS-25.

A target is not a launch date until the rocket flies, and NASA's own pages give times two minutes apart. NASA's launch schedule, checked on November 11, listed CRS-25 for no earlier than November 29 at 10:47 a.m.; the timestamp in the page's code converts to 15:47 UTC, or 10:47 a.m. EST, by our reading. We give both because NASA's two pages disagree.

From launch to the station

Once Cygnus reaches the station, astronauts aboard will use the Canadarm2 robotic arm to capture it and install it on the Earth-facing port of the Unity module, where the crew can unload it, according to NASA's advisory. NASA plans for the spacecraft to stay attached until May 2027.

An earlier Cygnus XL spent nearly six months on Unity before the arm let it go on October 9, 2026, according to a photo caption in the same advisory. NASA said that at the moment the picture was taken, the station was flying 263 miles above the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar.

CRS-25 is the 25th spacecraft Northrop Grumman has built to bring supplies to the station under its contract with NASA, the agency said.

What is on board

Besides food, supplies and equipment for the crew, NASA's advisory names several new experiments on this flight:

• hardware to make tiny particles inspired by DNA in orbit, which NASA says could improve drug delivery for cancer and osteoarthritis
• a study that aims to forecast whether a cancer will spread through a patient's body, which NASA says could inform treatment
• human muscle cells and drugs, to test possible therapies for the muscle loss seen in spaceflight and in aging on Earth
• a compact radiation sensor intended to make future missions safer for crews

NASA says its resupply flights carry research in biology and biotechnology, Earth and space science, physical sciences, and technology development and demonstrations. The advisory does not give the total mass of cargo on CRS-25.

Busy weeks for station traffic

Cygnus will arrive as other cargo traffic turns over. A SpaceX Dragon flying the company's 35th resupply mission for NASA launched on October 13 with more than 6,300 pounds of supplies and hardware, including the last pair of the station's roll-out solar arrays, and reached the station on October 15. NASA said at launch that it would stay until mid-November, then come home with time-critical research and cargo and splash down off the coast of California.

On November 10, NASA's station blog said crew members were preparing microbe samples to return to Earth on that Dragon “next week,” and that space had been cleared in the Kibo laboratory for hardware and supplies due to arrive on Cygnus in a few weeks.

Why NASA buys cargo flights

NASA presents commercial resupply as a way to keep a national capability to deliver research to the station. In the advisory it also says that as companies concentrate on carrying people to low Earth orbit and on building destinations there, the agency is putting its own resources into deep space missions to the Moon, under its Artemis and Moon Base programs, as a foundation for the first astronaut missions to Mars.

People have lived and worked on the station continuously for 26 years, NASA says, and the station is where it studies the effects of long spaceflights. The station's current crew is Expedition 75: on November 10, NASA's blog described commander Pyotr Dubrov and flight engineers Anil Menon, Joshua Kutryk, Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Anna Kikina and Sergey Teteryatnikov at work aboard.

The Dragon is due to leave first. After that, the next milestone for CRS-25 is the launch itself, and NASA lists any change to the target on its launch schedule.