A day-and-a-half after launching from Florida, SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon spacecraft is on course to dock at the International Space Station Thursday to deliver fresh food, experiments, and provisions for the lab’s seven-person crew.
The automated linkup between the Dragon supply ship and the Harmony module on the space station is scheduled for 7:28 a.m. EDT (1128 GMT) Thursday, following the mission’s launch Tuesday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission is SpaceX’s 27th resupply flight to the space station, and its arrival continues a busy stretch of activity for the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the orbiting complex. NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg is monitoring the Dragon spacecraft’s approach and docking, standing by to send commands to halt or abort the rendezvous using a control panel inside the space station.
The reusable Dragon spacecraft on track to arrive at the station Thursday is making its third visit to the research lab. SpaceX began launching cargo missions to the space station in 2012 under a multibillion-dollar Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA.
Earlier this month, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launched to the space station with a fresh set of four crew members — including Hoburg — for a six-month expedition, replacing four station residents who returned to Earth on a separate Crew Dragon capsule Saturday night.
In the next few months, NASA and its commercial partners plan to send two short-duration crew missions to the station — the first astronaut mission on Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, and a fully private mission with two Americans and two Saudi Arabian space fliers on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Each mission will stay at the outpost for a week to 10 days.
An unpiloted Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply ship is set for launch to the space station from Virginia later this spring, and Russia’s space agency plans to return a damaged Soyuz spacecraft from the complex to Earth on March 28. The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft will land without a crew on-board after it leaked out all of its coolant fluid in December, an incident still under investigation by Russian engineers.
Last month, Russia launched a replacement Soyuz to provide a ride home later this year for the three-man crew originally expected to return to Earth on Soyuz MS-22.
The Expedition 68 crew currently aboard the station is led by Russian commander Sergey Prokopyev, who is joined by with Russian cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Andrey Fedyaev, U.S. astronauts Frank Rubio, Steve Bowen, Woody Hoburg, and United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi.
After docking, astronauts on the space station will open hatches and begin unpacking cargo inside the pressurized compartment of the Dragon spacecraft, while the space station’s Canadian-built robotic arm will reach into the unpressurized trunk of the spacecraft to extract a half-ton package of science and tech demo experiments sponsored by the U.S. military’s Space Test Program.
The unpiloted cargo freighter is packed with 6,288 pounds (2,852 kilograms) of supplies and experiments, according to NASA. Nearly half the payload mass consists of research investigations, with crew supplies and hardware for space station systems also aboard the Dragon spacecraft.
The seven-person crew aboard the outpost will receive a shipment of fresh food, including apples, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, and cheeses, according to Phil Dempsey, NASA’s transportation integration manager for the International Space Station program.
Meghan Everett, NASA’s deputy chief scientist for the space station program, said the CRS-27 mission carries equipment to support approximately 60 new scientific investigations and technology demonstration experiments. Most of the research payloads are packed inside the Dragon spacecraft’s pressurized cabin.
“With these investigations, we look forward to impactful scientific results to advance human exploration in space and technologies here on Earth,” Everett said.
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