On Tuesday at 8:30 pm, a big Falcon 9 rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This rocket was carrying an important Dragon spacecraft loaded with thousands of pounds of supplies for research, equipment, and astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). It’s SpaceX’s 27th mission to provide resources to the ISS.
On the evening of EDT (Eastern Daylight Time), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying an uncrewed Dragon spacecraft roared to life and blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida right on time.
Dragon has now made it to space. It will take 36 hours to finally reach the space station. When it arrives, an astronaut (Woody Hoburg) will guide the docking process and make sure everything goes as planned. You can watch this process by tuning into NASA TV at 6:15 in the morning on Thursday, March 16th. The docking is expected to occur at 7:52 a.m.
Dragon is not only bringing some supplies and fresh food for the space station, but also conducting scientific and research experiments. Two of these experiments – Cardinal Heart 2.0 and Engineered Heart Tissues-2 – are part of the National Institutes for Health and International Space Station National Laboratory’s research project called Tissue Chips in Space. The goal is to use small devices with living cells that act like human heart tissues or organs to see how our health changes when we are in outer space. This information may help us to improve our health here on Earth!
At 8:30 p.m. EDT, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket fromNASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This rocket is carrying the Dragon spacecraft, which will spend about a month attached to the International Space Station doing research and collecting things to bring back to Earth. After that, it will fly back here and land in the water off the coast of Florida.
The Falcon 9 rocket has nine engines that turned on soon after it lifted off. After about five minutes, the first stage separated from the vehicle and fell down into the Atlantic Ocean. It landed safely “A Shortfall of Gravitas” which is a kind of ship. This was the seventh flight for this Falcon 9 to be successful and is also the second Dragon mission going up to space this year – just two weeks ago there was a similar launch.
Next, the small Dragon spaceship detached from the second stage ofhe Falcon 9 rocket, and will eventually make its way to the International Space Station. It is carrying important supplies, materials, and tools that will be used in experiments on the space station.
Dragon, the spacecraft, is scheduled to dock at the space station on Thursday morning (March 16th) at 7:52 a.m. EDT. This spot was recently left open by the return of Endurance carrying four astronauts (Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, Koichi Wakata and Anna Kikina) from their mission last Saturday (March 11th).
Tonight, SpaceX is launching their 216th mission and the second Dragon launch of 2023. This will be the third time this uncrewed Dragon spacecraft has flown. If all goes as expected, teams hope to recover the Falcon 9’s first stage after it returns from Earth – which would be a total of 178 successful rocket recoveries. An all-female crew located on boarded SpaceX’s drone ship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” off Florida’s coast are responsible for leading these recovery operations.
