Crew Awaits Dragon Filled with New Science Benefitting Humans

The SpaceX Dragon resupply ship lifts off atop the Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida just after sunset. Credit: NASA TV
The SpaceX Dragon resupply ship lifts off atop the Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida just after sunset. Credit: NASA TV

More than 5,800 pounds of new science experiments and crew supplies are on their way to the International Space Station after the successful launch of the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft on Thursday. Dragon blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:44 p.m. and reached orbit less than nine minutes later beginning its day-and-a-half-long trip to the orbital lab.

The U.S. space freighter is scheduled to dock automatically to the Harmony module’s forward port at 11:20 a.m. on Saturday. NASA astronauts Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins will be on duty monitoring Dragon’s automated rendezvous and docking. NASA TV, on the agency’s app and website, will begin live coverage at 10 a.m. as Dragon approaches the station for a monthlong stay.

Hines and Watkins along with Expedition 67 Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency) called down to Mission Control today and discussed Saturday morning’s arrival of Dragon. The quartet also spent Friday configuring station systems to accommodate the critical research Dragon is delivering including a human immune system study, a protein production investigation, and a cancer treatment experiment.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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