SpaceX launches a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Cargo Dragon spacecraft toward the International Space Station today, Tuesday, October 13. The flight is NASA’s 35th Commercial Resupply Services mission, known as CRS-35. Liftoff comes at 6:33 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Dragon is carrying more than 6,300 pounds of supplies, science investigations and equipment. The most notable cargo, stowed in the unpressurized trunk, is the final pair of ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays, which will boost power generation on the aging station.
The science on board includes hardware to manufacture artificial retinas in microgravity and 3D heart tissue models for large-scale drug testing.
The capsule, Cargo Dragon C211, is making its fourth flight after earlier cargo runs on CRS-26, CRS-29 and CRS-33. The Falcon 9 first-stage booster, B1096, is flying for the eighth time.
Dragon will take about 52 hours to reach the station. It is due to dock autonomously at the space-facing port of the Harmony module on Thursday, October 15, at about 11 a.m. EDT.
That port was recently vacated when the Crew Dragon Freedom brought the four astronauts of NASA’s Crew-12 mission back to Earth.
Dragon will stay docked for about a month while the Expedition 75 crew unloads supplies and reloads the vehicle with completed experiments and unneeded gear.
It will then return to Earth off the coast of California. That return trip matters, because Dragon is the only operational freighter that can bring cargo back down.
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