Next-generation Dragon cargo spacecraft gets back from space station
The first in SpaceX’s new generation of Dragon cargo rocket finished its mission with a splashdown off the Florida coast Jan. 13.
The CRS-21 Dragon shuttle sprinkled down in the Gulf of Mexico west of Tampa at 8:26 p.m. Eastern. It had undocked from the station a day and a half prior after unique designs for an undocking and splashdown Jan. 11 were delayed by helpless climate.
The Dragon took back to Earth around 2,000 kilograms of research payloads and other load from the station. The rocket, dispatched Dec. 6, carried almost 3,000 kilograms of freight to the station, including the Bishop business isolated space created by Nanoracks.
The CRS-21 mission was the first to utilize the new version of the Dragon cargo spacecraft, in light of the vehicle SpaceX created for the commercial team program. It incorporates extra payload volume and on-circle lifetime, and can dock and undock self-governingly, as opposed to be berthed by the station’s robotic arm.
The new cargo Dragons additionally sprinkle down off the Florida coast. Unique load Dragon missions sprinkled down in the Pacific, southwest of California, and could require a day or more to re-visitation of port. On the CRS-21 mission, time-delicate payload from the Dragon was moved by helicopter to a lab at the Kennedy Space Center inside six hours.
The Dragon is the second load shuttle to withdraw the station in the same number of weeks. Northrop Grumman’s NG-14 Cygnus shuttle left the station Jan. 6, a quarter of a year after its appearance. That rocket stays in circle performing tests, including one testing ignition for weightlessness, and will return Jan. 26.
“We’ve really hit our stride. This is our new normal,” Robyn Gatens, acting ISS chief at NASA Headquarters, said at a Jan. 13 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and activities panel. “Lots of vehicles coming and going, lots of activity on the station.”
The seven-man team right now on the station, including four NASA space explorers, is empowering what she called “significant more crew time for what can be dedicated to utilization,” or research exercises there. She noticed that had for some time been the objective of the business team program, which empowers the station to help seven individuals instead of the six it could generally oblige when the solitary way to go there was through Russia’s three-man Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA has not yet set an end date for the Crew-1 commercial group mission as of now docked there. Gatens said it’s probably going to end some time in May, around a half year after its dispatch. It will cover with the following Crew Dragon mission, Crew-2, whose dispatch is no sooner than March 30.
That date may slip, however, to oblige the second uncrewed dry run of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner shuttle. That is booked to launch March 29, in spite of the fact that Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, said at a similar panel meeting that the Starliner dispatch could climb a couple of days to March 25.
The CRS-21 Dragon took back to Earth an assortment of logical experiments, going from heart tissue cells tried on the station to fiber optic links delivered in microgravity. It likewise brought back a totally different business payload: 12 containers of red wine traveled to the station in late 2019 by European organization Space Cargo Unlimited.
The wine, alongside 320 pieces of grape plants additionally flown on the station, will be transported to an office in Bordeaux, France, to perceive how they were influenced by their time in space. That will incorporate what the organization called a “private, organoleptic wine tasting” to contrast the wine flown in space with wine that stayed on Earth.
