The robotic Dragon launched atop a Falcon 9 two-stage rocket Thursday night (July 14) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Falcon 9 delivered Dragon into low Earth orbit and the rocket’s first stage returned for a successful landing on SpaceX’s A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship. 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) over the South Atlantic. The current mission is SpaceX’s 25th cargo flight to the ISS for NASA, so it is known as CRS-25. (CRS stands for “commercial resupply services.”) The number has grown at a slow but steady rate of about two per year since the company’s first operational ISS cargo mission in 2012. SpaceX’s overall launch rate is of course much higher: the CRS-25 launch was the 30th Hawk 9 released 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 blows my mind,” Reid told reporters during a conference call shortly after Thursday night’s kickoff. “To think we’ve launched three Dragons to the station already this year is pretty cool,” added Reed, “including the first all-commercial mission to the station and a NASA crew mission as well.” The other two Dragon missions that took off this year — both in April — had crews. One, called Ax-1, carried paying customers to the orbiting lab on a flight organized by Houston company Axiom Space. The other was Crew-4SpaceX’s fourth contract astronaut mission for NASA. About half the weight that Dragon carried to the ISS on CRS-25 is dedicated to scientific research. The mission contributes to nearly 40 ongoing research projects taking place at the orbiting laboratory, and a few more have been dropped, NASA officials said. A study, by the European Space Agency and the University of Florence in Italy, explores its implications microgravity about the healing process of sutured wounds. Another, from the University of California, San Francisco, will study the immune system’s relationship to aging and the body’s ability to heal itself. There is also a research to study a special type of biopolymer concrete, which could help in the search for future building materials on the moon. Loaded into Dragon’s trunk, the EMIT experiment — short for Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation — will be pulled from its pod using the ISS’s robotic arm and placed on Express Logistics Carrier 1, an exposed external payload bay used for experiments and storage. EMIT will spend the next year studying the mineral composition of dust in Earth’s arid regions to help scientists better understand the planet’s global climate system.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule separates from the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage after launch on the CRS-25 cargo mission to the International Space Station on July 14, 2022. (Image credit: SpaceX) Some of the CRS-25 cargo, while not part of other ongoing research, serves as a symbol of the science that sustains daily life on the space station — and also underscores how amazing it is to be able to operate a science lab in space at all. Dina Contella, NASA’s operations integration manager for the ISS, highlighted other hardware packed into Dragon. “One item is a backup dosing pump, which is critical for the toilet,” Contella said at Thursday’s news conference. Dosing pumps are used to treat urine before the filter and recovery process to turn it into drinkable water — in case you forgot there’s no water in space and astronauts have to drink their own recycled pee. “We’ve also released some brine processor assembly cysts,” Contella said. “These allow us to recover even more water from the urine effort [than] normal processing. So the new bladders further increase our ability to recover as much water as possible.” He added that two filters for the station’s drinking water dispensers are also included in the Dragon manifesto. Dragon is expected to remain docked to the ISS for about a month and be loaded with equipment from the station before returning to Earth with a splashdown off the coast of Florida sometime in mid-August. Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:55 a.m. EDT on July 16 with news of the successful docking. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or enabled Facebook (opens in a new tab).
