The Antares system is being upgraded with newly built RD-181 first stage engines to provide greater payload performance and increased reliability.

[15] This was the sixth of ten flights by Orbital ATK under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA.

[4] In keeping with an Orbital ATK tradition, this Cygnus spacecraft is named the S.S. Alan Poindexter after the NASA astronaut who flew aboard the Space Shuttle twice (2008 and 2010).

The schedule will be influenced by the first USA crewed commercial flights (SpaceX, Boeing) to ISS since Space Shuttle retirement in 2011.

[14][20] On 25 November 2016, after leaving the ISS, the spacecraft raised its orbit to 500 kilometers and released four Lemur-2 cubesats for Spire Global.