A 23-story-tall SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket manufactured in Hawthorne blasted off Saturday afternoon in the 100th trip ever from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex-39A, once home to the historic Apollo missions.
A Dragon spacecraft at the nose of the 10-engine rocket carried 6,000 pounds of space research materials and crucial supplies for five astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
Not only was the cargo delivered to orbit successfully after the 2:07 p.m. PDT launch via the first-ever reflown Dragon, but SpaceX brought back home the first-stage rocket booster that propelled the whole apparatus outside Earth’s atmosphere.
The Dragon spacecraft, parts of which have been repaired and replaced, was previously flown on the CRS-4 mission in late 2014. It will return to Earth in about a month, dropping down in the Pacific Ocean near Baja California.
“Under the CRS contracts, SpaceX has restored an American capability to deliver and return significant amounts of cargo, including live plants and animals, to and from the orbiting laboratory,” SpaceX officials said in a written statement. “A variant of the Dragon spacecraft, called Dragon 2, is being developed for U.S.-based crew transport to and from the station.”
Crewed commercial missions are set to begin next year.
Eight minutes after liftoff, the booster smoothly returned to Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This was the 11th successful first-stage rocket booster return landing for the company, which is working toward creating rapidly reusable rocket equipment to greatly reduce the cost of getting payloads and astronauts into orbit.
Contract through 2024
This was also SpaceX’s 11th launch on behalf of NASA since the company became the first commercial rocket builder to dock at the station about 220 miles above Earth’s atmosphere five years ago. It has nine more missions for NASA under the current contract, as well as another contract that will continue through 2024.
Greg Autry, a USC professor, space entrepreneurship researcher and former NASA liaison to the White House, tweeted congratulations to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for repeatedly returning rocket boosters to Earth intact. Musk hopes to soon be able to turn around flown rockets for reflight within 24 hours.
“Landings have gone to 11. Reuse is routine! Congrats, but you’ll need to juggle snakes while landing to get my attention,” Autry tweeted, shortly after the Saturday launch.
Musk, who publicly quit his roles as a business adviser to President Donald Trump over his withdrawal from the Paris global climate accord last week, simply tweeted in the morning: “First reflight of a Dragon spacecraft set for later today.”
Saturday’s trip initially was set to take off Thursday afternoon, but a lightning storm delayed the launch. This was the 35th Falcon 9 mission ever, and the sixth this year from Cape Canaveral.
Wide range of experiments
On board, dozens of science experiments will join hundreds of research projects on the orbiting national laboratory, including a groundbreaking UCLA study that has already shown promise reversing the effects of osteoporosis and regrowing lost bone.
The NELL-1 study will analyze whether a newly discovered protein therapy can rebuild bone, which is significant because astronauts suffer extreme bone loss in microgravity.
Forty mice on board the rocket will be part of the experiment, and 20 of them will return inside Dragon in a month. If successful, they will be the first rodents returned by the U.S. to Earth. The Japanese already have successfully brought rodents back from outer space.
The returned mice, fitted in specially designed snug mice habitats, will splash down off the coast of Baja in early July. Along with other scientific cargo, including fruit flies in a study on the effects of microgravity on the heart, the mice will be towed to SpaceX’s dock in San Pedro.
In January, the company’s seventh successfully returned booster docked at the San Pedro waterfront for about a week.
Once at the San Pedro dock, the mice will be offloaded and delivered to UCLA researchers for further study.
“It has tremendous implications for humans with respect to long-term space travel or habitation,” said UCLA’s Dr. Chia Soo, the project’s principal investigator. “If it can work for microgravity-related bone loss, then it could have increased use for patients one day on Earth who have bone loss from trauma or aging.”
Also on board is a new technology platform called Multiple User System for Earth Sensing, or MUSES, which will enable small countries and large organizations previously blocked from access to space to operate their own small satellites for Earth imaging, data communications service, or other uses.
‘It’s a technology’
Developed with NASA support by Teledyne Brown Engineering in Alabama, MUSES is the first fully commercial payload ever delivered to the ISS.
“MUSES is the first multiuser platform facility for the ISS,” said Paul Galloway, its program manager. “It has huge data downlink capability. It gives us multiple view angles, too. This is not a science instrument, it’s a technology.”
The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is an instrument included in this trip’s primary payloads that holds promise for new, more accurate in-space navigation systems.
Once affixed to the exterior of the space station, NICER will study the physics of neutron stars, which are considered the densest and most magnetic objects in the universe, providing new insight into their nature and behavior.
A new Station Explorer for X-Ray Timing and Navigation will be tested as well, using pulsars as navigation beacons.
“Pulsars emit light all across the spectrum in narrow beams from their magnetic poles,” said Zaven Arzoumanian, science lead for the study. Neutron stars “have very rapid rotation hundreds of times every second. They’re faster than the blades of a household blender. NICER’s trying to understand what makes pulsars tick.”
Scientists also are testing a Roll-Out Solar Area, dubbed ROSA, that they hope will be the next stage in solar-powered propulsion in space.
The 15-by-5-foot test array will be deployed in nine days so researchers can study the vibrations on the very thin panels as they unfurl from the spacecraft. Those vibrations must be contained to ensure they don’t interfere with imaging satellites.
“We’re pretty excited about ROSA and what it means for the future,” said Jeremy Banik, the project’s principal investigator. “ROSA is important because all spacecraft need power. Traditional solar panels tend to be heavy and bulky. This is a big deal for satellites.”
A student research team at Lennox Middle School also got to send its study into orbit as part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. The students sent lemon-mint plants in a small tube of fertilized soil, hoping to determine whether the plant grows differently in microgravity than on Earth.
“We wanted to use mint because it’s something we use a lot in our Hispanic culture,” said Nayeli Salgado, one of the winning team members. “It has many uses — stomachaches, earaches. You can use it instead of medicine. It takes the pain away.”