Dragon capsule docks with space station on SpaceX’s 25th cargo mission
Dragon capsule docks with space station on SpaceX’s 25th cargo mission
By Josh Dinner published about 14 hours ago
Dragon linked up with the orbiting lab at 11:21 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT).
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A SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule met up with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday (July 16), delivering more than 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of supplies to the orbiting lab.
The robotic Dragon launched atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday night (July 14) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Falcon 9 delivered Dragon to low Earth orbit, and the rocket’s first stage came back down for a successful landing on the SpaceX droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas.
Dragon’s orbital chase ended Saturday: The capsule docked with the ISS at 11:21 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT), while the two spacecraft were flying 267 miles (430 kilometers) above the South Atlantic.
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The current mission is SpaceX’s 25th cargo flight to the ISS for NASA, so it’s known as CRS-25. (CRS stands for “commercial resupply services.”) The number has increased at a slow but steady pace of about two per year since the company’s first operational ISS cargo mission in 2012.
SpaceX’s overall launch cadence is much higher, of course: CRS-25’s liftoff was the 30th Falcon 9 launch so far this year. In contrast, SpaceX launched just 31 missions in all of 2021. According to Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director of human spaceflight, the company is poised to double that number by the end of this year.
“It kind of blows my mind,” Reed told reporters during a teleconference shortly after Thursday night’s launch. “To think that we’ve launched three Dragons to the station already this year is pretty cool,” Reed added, “including the first all-commercial mission to station and a NASA crew mission as well.”
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SpaceX launches CRS-25 Cargo Dragon mission to space station, nails landing
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The other two Dragon missions that lifted off this year — both in April — were crewed. One, called Ax-1, carried paying customers to the orbiting lab on a flight organized by Houston company Axiom Space. The other was Crew-4, SpaceX’s fourth contracted astronaut mission for NASA.
About half of the weight that Dragon hauled to the ISS on CRS-25 is dedicated to scientific research. The mission is contributing to nearly 40 ongoing research projects taking place on the orbital lab and dropped off a handful more, NASA officials said.
One study, from the European Space Agency and the University of Florence in Italy, is investigating the effects of microgravity on the healing process of sutured wounds. Another, from the Unive
