NASA to Air Departure of Upgraded SpaceX Cargo Dragon from Space Station
HOUSTON (NASA PR) — The SpaceX Dragon that arrived to the International Space Station on the company’s 21st resupply services mission for NASA is scheduled to depart on Monday, Jan. 11, loaded with 5,200 pounds of scientific experiments and other cargo. NASA Television and the agency’s website will broadcast its departure live beginning at 9 a.m. EST.
The upgraded Dragon spacecraft will execute the first undocking of a U.S. commercial cargo craft from the International Docking Adapter at 9:25 a.m., with NASA astronaut Victor Glover monitoring aboard the station.
Dragon will fire its thrusters to move a safe distance from the station’s space-facing port of the Harmony module, then initiate a deorbit burn to begin its re-entry sequence into Earth’s atmosphere. Dragon is expected to make its parachute-assisted splashdown around 9 p.m. – the first return of a cargo resupply spacecraft in the Atlantic Ocean. The deorbit burn and splashdown will not air on NASA TV.
Splashing down off the coast of Florida enables quick transportation of the science aboard the capsule to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center’s Space Station Processing Facility, and back into the hands of the researchers. This shorter transportation timeframe allows researchers to collect data with minimal loss of microgravity effects. For splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean, quick-return science cargo is processed at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas, and delivered to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Dragon launched Dec. 6 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, arriving at the station just over 24 hours later and achieving the first autonomous docking of a U.S. commercial cargo resupply spacecraft. Previous arriving cargo Dragon spacecraft were captured and attached to the space station by astronauts operating the station’s robotic Canadarm2. The spacecraft delivered more than 6,400 pounds of hardware, research investigations and crew supplies.
The upgraded cargo Dragon capsule used for this mission contains double the powered locker availability of previous capsules, allowing for a significant increase in the research that can be carried back to Earth.
Some of the scientific investigations Dragon will return to Earth include:
Cardinal Heart
Microgravity causes changes in the workload and shape of the human heart, and it is still unknown whether these changes could become permanent if a person lived more than a year in space. Cardinal Heart studies how changes in gravity affect cardiovascular cells at the cellular and tissue level using 3D-engineered heart tissues, a type of tissue chip. Results could provide new understanding of heart problems on Earth, help identify new treatments, and support development of screening measures to predict cardiovascular risk prior to spaceflight.
Space Organogenesis
This investigation from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) demonstrates the growth of 3D organ buds from human stem cells to analyze changes in gene expression. Cell cultures on Earth need supportive materials or forces to achieve 3D growth, but in microgravity, cell cultures can expand into three dimensions without those devices. Results from this investigation could demonstrate advantages of using microgravity for cutting-edge developments in regenerative medicine and may contribute to the establishment of technologies needed to create artificial organs.
Sextant Navigation
The sextant used in the Sextant Navigation experiment will be returning to Earth. Sextants have a small telescope-like optical sight to take precise angle measurements between pairs of stars from land or sea, enabling navigation without computer assistance. Sailors have navigated via sextants for centuries, and NASA’s Gemini missions conducted the first sextant sightings from a spacecraft. This investigation tested specific techniques for using a sextant for emergency navigation on spacecraft such as NASA’s Orion, which will carry humans on deep-space missions.
Rodent Research-23
This experiment studies the function of arteries, veins, and lymphatic structures in the eye and changes in the retina of mice before and after spaceflight. The aim is to clarify whether these changes impair visual function. At least 40 percent of astronauts experience vision impairment known as Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS) on long-duration spaceflights, which could adversely affect mission success.
Thermal Amine Scrubber
This technology demonstration tested a method to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from air aboard the International Space Station, using actively heated and cooled amine beds. Controlling CO2 levels on the station reduces the likelihood of crew members experiencing symptoms of CO2 buildup, which include fatigue, headache, breathing difficulties, strained eyes, and itchy skin.
Bacterial Adhesion and Corrosion
Bacteria and other microorganisms have been shown to grow as biofilm communities in microgravity. This experiment identifies the bacterial genes used during biofilm growth, examines whether these biofilms can corrode stainless steel, and evaluates the effectiveness of a silver-based disinfectant. This investigation could provide insight into better ways to control and remove resistant biofilms, contributing to the success of future long-duration spaceflights.
Learn more about SpaceX missions for NASA at:
Get breaking news, images and features from the space station on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
9 responses to “NASA to Air Departure of Upgraded SpaceX Cargo Dragon from Space Station”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Mo0stly useless stuff 🙂
I want to amend my new years prediction
SpaceX SS/SH.. will not fly in some operational form this year…but when it does in the 2023 (earliest) more likely 2024 time frame…a metric of success is 1500 USD perpound with a 26 a year flight rate and three times Falcon9 inert payload mass to orbit.
Define operational. Starlink missions will happen way before then. It’s a free lunch as risk is all internal.
Some form of Starship designed for Starlink deployment will definitely fly in 2022. I’d say the odds are no worse than 1-in-3 such a thing could make its first test flight, with at least a partial payload, by 4Q 2021. Other Starship variants – tanker and depot ship – will follow quickly into testing in Q3 or Q4 2021 and achieve initial operational status in 2022.
2021 the year of operational Dragons going to and from orbit. Only geeks like us will care. That’s some solid progress. But keep in mind it took us a good decade to get here. Everything real takes time.
Yes. And it takes significantly more time when there’s a lot of political and NASA hoop-jumping on the critical path.
Not sure I agree. There’s real work to be done to prepare a system for operations. You either do that in analysis, or in operations. Starship will be that ‘pure’ operations approach you advocate for. I’m betting it’ll be 7 (call it 2025 ish) years into the steel Starship program before people start using it, and a lot more flights to get it ready than it took Dragon. I know you’ll invoke Boeing’s Starliner as a counter example, and my pre-counter point to that argument is Boeing did not do the engineering and analysis. That work is missing in Starliner. I’d argue there are whole chunks of computer code that are not there, let alone being wrong.
I think people will be flying on Starships by 2023 if not sooner. That is still the target year for Dear Moon and I don’t see that little jaunt as being a first-ever use case for humans on Starships.
I agree that Starship will fly unmanned many more times than D2 before humans are put aboard, but, given that D2 only flew three times – and only once orbitally – before carrying crew, that’s a pretty low bar to get over. A combination of Starship-based Starlink deployment missions plus all the on-orbit testing of tanker, depot and lunar lander prototypes will provide ample pre-people-aboard experience. Such missions will dominate Starship ops starting perhaps as soon as late this year and rising steeply as 2022 goes along.
Starliner is certainly another example of how slow government-dominated programs can go. But in its particular case, the slowness has more to do with legacy contractor culture and perverse incentives than with government meddling, per se. I’m inclined to agree that NASA “meddled” rather less with Starliner than it retrospectively seems it should have. Had it done so, though, it seems likely Starliner would have been rendered even later than it already is, thereby.
However odd it may seem, I even agree that government involvement can accelerate development projects. But we haven’t seen a live example of such since Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
WW2 was pretty much the Golden Age for that sort of thing. Of course, with the notable exception of the Manhattan Project, all the quick development programs were actually run by private-sector companies under the direction of the industrialist brain trust that was the War Production Board.
Hrm…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…