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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida – SpaceX launched a newer and larger version of its Dragon supply craft to the International Space Station on Sunday, marking the first time the company has two capsules in orbit at the same time.
The Dragon, filled with Christmas gifts and presents, should arrive at the space station on Monday, joining the Dragon who delivered four astronauts last month.
“Dragons wherever you look,” said Kenny Todd, deputy director of NASA’s space station program.
With NASA’s commercial crew program officially underway, SpaceX hopes to always have at least one Dragon capsule on the space station.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off with the latest Dragon from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where coronavirus precautions kept personnel to a minimum. The first stage thruster, making its fourth flight, landed on an ocean platform several minutes after takeoff in the late morning. It was first used in May for Elon Musk’s company’s first astronaut launch.
The 6,400-pound (2,900-kilogram) shipment includes billions of microbes and asteroid samples ground up for a biomining study, a new medical device to provide rapid blood test results for astronauts in space, and a proprietary camera and private operation to move such large experiments. like refrigerators outside the orbiting laboratory. Forty mice also fly for bone and eye studies, two areas of weakness for astronauts during long space stays.
Todd called all of this research “the best Christmas present” for NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, a virus hunter who performed the first DNA sequencing in space a few years ago.
As for the most personal gifts for the four Americans, two Russians and a Japanese on board, “I don’t like being in front of Santa Claus. I’m afraid it will ruin my own Christmas, ”Todd said late last week. “Let’s see what happens when they open the hatch … I’m optimistic.”
For the astronauts’ Christmas feast, the Dragon brings roast turkey, cornbread dressing, cranberry sauce, shortbread cookies and tubes of frosting.
The station crew watched a live broadcast of the launch, from 250 miles (400 kilometers) up.
This updated cargo transport model, as large as the SpaceX crew capsule, will dock to the orbiting laboratory on its own. Previous SpaceX cargo ships needed the station’s robotic arm to anchor.
The capsule will stay on the space station for about a month, as usual, before undocking with old equipment and experiments and splashing around in the Atlantic. That’s another change from SpaceX’s older cargo ships, which parachuted into the Pacific. Coming back closer to Cape Canaveral will save recycling time.
This is SpaceX’s 21st supply station for NASA since 2012. The flight was delayed one day due to bad weather in the offshore booster recovery area. This was SpaceX’s 68th successful landing.
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