Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Orbital Sciences Corp. completed
its first attempt to fly an unmanned commercial craft to the
International Space Station.

Cygnus, the cargo spacecraft, landed this morning just
before 8:45 a.m. New York time, Orbital said today in a
statement. The capsule was carried by the company’s Antares
rocket, which lifted off from the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern
Shore on Sept. 18.

The successful mission means Orbital can now start making
regular cargo deliveries under its $1.9 billion NASA contract.
NASA is counting on private companies such as Orbital and Elon
Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to resupply the
space station after retiring its fleet in 2011.

“Today, with the successful berthing of the Orbital
Sciences Cygnus cargo module to the ISS, we have expanded
America’s capability for reliably transporting cargo to low-Earth orbit,” Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator, said today in
a statement. “It is an historic milestone as this second
commercial partner’s demonstration mission reaches the ISS.”

The Orbital spacecraft had been expected to reach the
station on Sept. 22. Completion of the flight was postponed due
to a mismatch in data format that required fixing and because it
had to wait for the arrival of the Soyuz space crew.

“A small data format discrepancy was addressed and
patched,” Barron Beneski, a spokesman for Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital, said today in an e-mail. “So today was our first
opportunity to rendezvous and it went flawlessly.”