Coming up Friday, launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft on a resupply mission to the ISS.
The second International Space Station Commercial Resupply Services
flight by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is set for liftoff at
10:10 a.m. EST on March 1 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station in Florida.
Carried by a Falcon 9 rocket, the Dragon spacecraft will ferry 1,268
pounds of supplies for the space station crew and for experiments being
conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The Falcon 9 and Dragon were manufactured at SpaceX headquarters in
Hawthorne, Calif., and arrived at the Florida launch site by truck. The
rocket, topped with the spacecraft, stands 157-feet tall.
The two-stage rocket uses nine engines to power the first stage,
generating 855,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, rising to nearly
1,000,000 pounds of thrust as Falcon 9 climbs out of Earth’s atmosphere.
One engine powers the second stage to complete the climb to space. The
14.4-foot-tall Dragon spacecraft is capable of carrying more than 7,000
pounds of cargo split between pressurized and unpressurized sections.
On March 2, Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineer Tom
Marshburn of NASA are scheduled use the station's robot arm to grapple
Dragon following its rendezvous with the orbiting outpost. Ground
commands will be sent to attach the spacecraft to the Earth-facing port
of the station's Harmony module where it will remain for a few weeks
while astronauts unload cargo. The crew then will load more than 2,600
pounds of experiment samples and equipment for return to Earth.
Dragon is scheduled for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California on March 25.
This SpaceX flight is the second of at least 12 missions to the space
station that the company will fly for NASA under the Commercial Resupply
Services contract.
SOURCE NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center
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