You can watch the live action of the rendezvous between the International Space Station and the Dragon capsule.
On Thursday night, the Dragon was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Dragon was delivered by the Falcon 9 and the first stage came back down for a successful landing.
The cargo capsule will dock with the International Space Station at 11:20 a.m. on Thursday. The sun rises and sets at 1520GMT. The rendezvous can be watched at Space.com or via the space agency. At 10 a.m., coverage starts. The sun goes down at 1400GMT.
There are 8 ways that the space company has changed spaceflight.
The current mission is the 25th for the company and it's called CRS 25. CRS stands for Commercial Resupply Services. Since the first operationalISS cargo mission in 2012 the number has increased at a slow but steady pace.
The 30th Falcon 9 launch of the year wasCRS 25. Only 31 missions were launched by SpaceX in the entire year. The company is expected to double that number by the end of the year according to Reed.
Reed told reporters during a teleconference that it blew his mind. "It's pretty cool that we've launched three Dragons to the station already this year, including the first all-commercial mission to station and a NASA crew mission as well," Reed said.
Two of the three dragon missions that lifted off this year were crewed. A flight organized by Houston company Axiom Space carried paying customers to the space station. Crew-4 was the fourth contracted crew for NASA.
The Dragon is carrying cargo to the International Space Station. Half of the weight is devoted to research. NASA officials said that more than 40 ongoing research projects are taking place on the orbital lab.
The European Space Agency and the University of Florence in Italy are studying the effects of microgravity on healing wounds. The immune system's relationship to aging and the body's ability to heal itself will be studied by another. A special type of biopolymer concrete that could be used on the moon is being investigated.
The EMIT experiment will be pulled from its stowed in Dragon and mounted to the ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 1 in order to conduct experiments. Scientists will be able to better understand the planet's global climate system by studying the mineral composition of dust.
While not part of other ongoing investigations, some of Dragon's cargo serves as a symbol of the science that keeps everyday life on the space station going, as well as highlighting how miraculous it is that we can operate a scientific laboratory in space at all. NASA's operations integration manager highlighted other hardware packed aboard Dragon.
There is a spare dose pump that is critical for the toilet. There is no water in space and astronauts have to drink their own recycled pee, so Dose pumps are used to treat urine prior to the reclamation process.
Brine processor assembly bladders have been launched. We can recover more water from the urine effort with these. The new bladders increase the amount of water that can be reclaimed. Two filters for the station's water dispensers were included in the dragon's manifest.
Dragon will stay at the International Space Station for about a month and then return to Earth with a splashdown off the coast of Florida in mid-August.
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