Private Rocket Poised to Make History With Saturday Launch
- The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying …
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private spacecraft stands ready to launch on a
historic first visit to the International Space Station tomorrow (May
19).
The unmanned Dragon space capsule,
built by commercial firm SpaceX, is slated to lift off atop the
company's Falcon 9 rocket early Saturday from here at the Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station. The spacecraft has an instantaneous launch window at
4:55 a.m. EDT (0855 GMT), with a 70 percent chance of good weather
predicted (the main risk of a delay is posed by the possibility of
cumulus clouds).
If all goes well, Dragon
will fly by the space station on Monday (May 21) and rendezvous and
berth at the outpost the day after, becoming the first non-governmental
vehicle to do so. The mission is the final test flight planned for
Dragon, which has been developed under NASA's COTS (Commercial Orbital
Transportation Services) program aimed at nurturing private spacecraft to supply the International Space Station.
The mission is a critical test for NASA's plan to outsource
transportation to low-Earth orbit to the commercial sector, allowing the
agency to begin work on a new heavy-lift rocket for deep space. Some in
Congress and elsewhere have been critical of the scheme, arguing that
private vehicles are untested and less reliable than NASA's in-house
built spacecraft. [Photos: SpaceX Poised for Historic Launch]
If Saturday's launch is successful, it could help sway the naysayers, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said.
"I think it will make a tremendous difference," Bolden told SPACE.com
in April. "Everybody wants to see performance. You can promise things
all you want, but nothing works like actual performance, and so it's a
very important mission for SpaceX but an incredibly important mission
for us at NASA."
SpaceX (officially Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne,
Calif.) has designed Dragon to fly robotically at first, though the
company has designs to man-rate the capsule. Eventually, Dragon is
planned to be able to carry up to seven crewmembers to orbit, and could
be used to transport astronauts as well as cargo to the space station.
For this test flight, Dragon is loaded with 1,014 pounds (460
kilograms) of cargo for the orbiting laboratory, including 674 pounds
(306 kg) of food, clothing and supplies for the station's six-man crew.
It will also deliver scientific equipment and electronic hardware, including a laptop.
If the capsule's on-orbit checkouts go smoothly, then on Tuesday (May
22), NASA astronaut Don Pettit and European Space Agency flyer Andre
Kuipers use the space station's 57.7-foot (17.6-meter) robotic arm to
reach out and grab Dragon and berth it to the station's Harmony node.
The vehicle is scheduled to stay at the outpost for about two weeks.
Then, it will be unberthed and will head back to Earth where it is
planned to re-enter the atmosphere and land in the Pacific Ocean.
In contrast to the other unmanned vehicles that ferry cargo to the
space station, Dragon is equipped with a heat shield to survive re-entry
and be recovered after landing. Thus, before it departs the station,
astronauts plan to load it full of science experiments ready for
analysis on the ground, as well as used hardware to be returned to NASA.
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