SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule rendezvoused with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday (July 16), delivering more than 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of supplies to the orbiting laboratory.
The robotic dragon launched atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket Thursday evening (July 14) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Falcon 9 delivered the Dragon to low Earth orbit and the rocket’s first stage returned to successfully land SpaceX’s unmanned spacecraft A Shortfall of Gravitas.
Dragon’s orbital pursuit ended Saturday: The capsule docked with the ISS at 11:21 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT) as the two spacecraft flew 267 miles (430 kilometers) over the South Atlantic.
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The current mission is SpaceX’s 25th cargo flight to the ISS for NASA, so it’s known as CRS-25. (CRS stands for “Commercial Resupply Services.”) The number has increased 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 cadence is much higher, of course: CRS-25’s liftoff was the 30th Falcon 9 launched so far this year. In contrast, SpaceX launched just 31 missions in all of 2021. According to Benji Reid, SpaceX’s senior director of human spaceflight, the company is poised to double that number by the end of this year.
“It kind of blows my mind,” Reid told reporters on a conference call shortly after Thursday night’s launch. “To think that we’ve already launched three Dragons to the station this year is pretty cool,” Reid added, “including the first fully commercial mission to the station and NASA’s crewed mission.”
The other two Dragon missions that launched this year — both in April — were crewed. One called Axe-1, transports paying customers to the orbiting laboratory on a flight organized by Houston-based company Axiom Space. The other was Crew-4the fourth contracted SpaceX astronaut mission for NASA.
About half the weight that Dragon towed to the ISS on CRS-25 is devoted to scientific research. The mission contributes to nearly 40 ongoing research projects taking place at the orbiting laboratory and has dropped several more, NASA officials said.
A study from the European Space Agency and the University of Florence in Italy examined the effects of microgravity on the healing process of sutured wounds. Another, from the University of California, San Francisco, will study the relationship of the immune system to aging and the body’s ability to heal itself. There is also an investigation into researching a special type of biopolymer concrete that could aid 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 lifted out of place using the ISS’s robotic arm and mounted to ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 1, an open 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.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule separates from the upper stage of its Falcon 9 rocket following the launch of the CRS-25 cargo mission to the International Space Station on July 14, 2022. (Image: SpaceX)
Some of CRS-25’s cargo, while not part of other ongoing investigations, serves as a symbol of the science that sustains the daily life of the space station — and also underscores how miraculous it is that we can run a science lab in space at all . Dina Contella, NASA’s operational integration manager for the ISS, highlighted other hardware packed aboard Dragon.
“One item is a back-up dose pump, which is crucial for the toilet,” Contella said in a press call on Thursday. Dosing pumps are used to treat urine before the filtration and recovery process to turn it back into potable water—in case you forgot that there is no water in space and astronauts have to drink their own recycled urine.
“We’ve also released some bubbles to assemble brine processors,” Contella said. “They 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.” She added that two filters for the station’s drinking water dispensers are also included in the Dragon manifest.
Dragon is expected to remain tethered to the ISS for about a month and be loaded with equipment from the station before returning to Earth with a landing 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.
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