SpaceX’s NASA cargo heads to space station

After lofting the Dragon into orbit, SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of the rocket back at Cape Canaveral.

The SpaceX rocket has a launch window for Monday, August 14 at 12:31 EST.

SpaceX is preparing to launch a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral this afternoon to send a Dragon capsule full of cargo to the International Space Station.

The weather was almost ideal for launch, with the 45th Space Wing predicting an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions. Future launches will use refurbished Dragons, cutting costs and allowing SpaceX to focus on building Dragons suitable for ferrying humans to space.

But the next generation of “smart” spacecraft will need better computers because the lag time between earth and the spacecraft is going to get longer. Launch weather concerns are mostly some cumulus clouds expected Monday.

Dragon will return to Earth with more than 3,000 pounds of cargo after an approximately one-month stay at the orbiting laboratory. That includes 20 mice.

Dragon’s cargo also includes equipment for the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass project, an experiment created to study cosmic rays. While outside the space station, the duo will manually launch five nanosatellites, each with a different objective – not all of them scientific. “Every day on the station we will increase the statistics, and the statistical uncertainties get reduced, and we can detect higher energies than before”. Subsequent recovery missions, however, have been successful, both at and on.

Just a few minutes after the launch, the Dragon craft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and deployed its solar panels.

This is SpaceX’s 12 mission to the ISS.

This will be SpaceX’s 11th launch attempt of 2017, with the company already having flown more rockets into space this year than in any previous calendar year.

As with all rendezvous missions, the launch was timed for the moment Earth’s rotation carried historic pad 39A – and the Falcon 9 – into the plane of the station’s orbit, a requirement when it comes to catching up with a target moving at an orbital velocity of 5 miles per second.

SpaceX’s launch is part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services Contract.

As the second stage of Falcon 9 continues to lift its Dragon payload into orbit, the first stage, 1039, made its way back to Landing Zone-1 (LZ-1) for yet another picture flawless recovery.

Dragon 2 will fly first with crew sometime in 2018.

In particular, the company is hoping for three things that can be fed back into non-spacefaring technology: a set of parameters on the BIOS, in the CPU and in the memory systems that’s stable and reliable; the physical operating systems, such as voltage and heat, that give reliability; and optimise the software stack that controls the other two.

Next Monday, Aug. 21, millions of Americans will enjoy a total solar eclipse, weather permitting, as the moon’s shadow races from OR to SC.