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WASHINGTON – The first of SpaceX’s next-generation Dragon spacecraft completed its mission with a splashdown off the coast of Florida on January 13.
The CRS-21 Dragon spacecraft crashed in the Gulf of Mexico west of Tampa at 8:26 p.m. EST. It had undocked from the station a day and a half earlier after initial plans for undocking and mooring on January 11 were postponed due to bad weather.
The Dragon brought back to Earth about 2,000 kilograms of research payloads and other cargo from the station. The spacecraft, launched on December 6, brought nearly 3,000 kilograms of cargo to the station, including the Bishop commercial airlock developed by Nanoracks.
The CRS-21 mission was the first to use the new version of the Dragon cargo spacecraft, based on the SpaceX vehicle developed for the Commercial Crew Program. It features additional cargo volume and orbit life, and can dock and undock autonomously, rather than being docked by the station’s robotic arm.
The new cargo dragons are also splashing off the coast of Florida. The original Dragon freighter missions erupted in the Pacific, southwestern California, and could take a day or more to return to port. During mission CRS-21, the Dragon’s urgent cargo was transported by helicopter to a laboratory in the Kennedy Space Center within six hours.
The Dragon is the second cargo spacecraft to leave the station in as many weeks. Northrop Grumman’s NG-14 Cygnus spacecraft left the station on January 6, three months after arriving. This spacecraft remains in orbit to perform experiments, including a weightless combustion test, and will return on January 26.
“We really hit our goal. This is our new normal, ”said Robyn Gatens, Acting Director of the ISS at NASA Headquarters, at a Jan. 13 meeting of the Exploration and Human Exploitation Committee of the NASA Advisory Board. . “Lots of vehicles coming and going, lots of activity at the station.”
The seven-person crew currently on the station, including four NASA astronauts, allow for what she called “much more crew time for what can be spent on use” or on research activities. over there. She noted that this has long been the goal of the Commercial Crew Program, which allows the station to accommodate seven people instead of the six it traditionally could accommodate when the only way to get there was the Russian three-person Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA has yet to set an end date for the Crew-1 commercial crew mission that is currently docked there. Gatens said it will likely end in May, around six months after launch. It will overlap with the upcoming Crew Dragon mission, Crew-2, which launches no earlier than March 30.
However, that date may slip to accommodate the second unmanned test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Its launch is scheduled for March 29, although Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, said at the same committee meeting that the Starliner’s launch could increase by a few days until March 25.
The CRS-21 Dragon brought back to Earth a variety of science experiments, from heart tissue cells tested at the station to fiber optic cables produced in microgravity. He also reported a very different commercial payload: 12 bottles of red wine transported to the station in late 2019 by European company Space Cargo Unlimited. The wine, along with 320 vine extracts also transported to the station, will be shipped to a facility in Bordeaux, France, to see how they have been affected by their time in space. This will include what the company has called a “private organoleptic wine tasting” to compare wine transported into space to wine that remains on Earth.
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