The first operational Cygnus mission delivered around 1,260 kilograms of supplies and experiments in January 2014, including a large batch of student-designed experiments from schools across the United States.
It also carried a set of small commercial imaging satellites to be released from the station later — an early example of the station being used as a deployment platform for CubeSats, which has since become a routine business.
The spacecraft was named for Gordon Fullerton, the Shuttle astronaut who had flown the third orbital test flight and commanded the Spacelab-2 mission, and who had died six months earlier.
Its arrival established a second independent supply route to the station — the central objective of the commercial resupply programme, since reliance on any single vehicle had been shown repeatedly to be a strategic weakness.
The flight was uneventful, which for a first operational mission is the desired outcome. It departed after a month loaded with waste and burned up over the Pacific.
