Posted on 07/17/2016 5:14:52 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The unmanned Falcon rocket is scheduled to lift off early Monday. Excellent weather is forecast for the 12:45 a.m. launch.
Aboard the rocket is a replica of the docking port destroyed in a SpaceX launch accident last summer. This is port No. 2. NASA needs at least one and preferably two of these ports for crew capsules under development by both SpaceX and Boeing.
Americans have been stuck riding Russian rockets to the International Space Station since shuttles stopped flying five years ago this month. The SpaceX Dragon and Boeing Starliner capsules will ease this Russian dependency.
SpaceX, meanwhile, will try to land its leftover booster back at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, just a couple miles from the Falcon launch pad. The California-based company wants to reuse its rockets to save time and money. It's only landed a used first-stage booster on land once, back in December. Three other boosters touched down vertically on an ocean platform, after delivering spacecraft to orbit.
SpaceX's vice president of flight reliability, Hans Koenigsmann, said Saturday that the company plans to launch its first recycled booster this fall.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, meanwhile, holds about 5,000 pounds of food, science experiments and equipment. One-thousand pounds of that is the all-important docking port.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
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NASA: not about space anymore
Guess I will be staying up late tonight!
Maybe spend some time on the FREEPATHON!
I really liked the old NASA but what NASA has become is a joke. Muslim out reach and just last week an article about $73k spent on astronaut diversity training. And they wonder why they have to hitch rides with the Russians. Any agency this wasteful and stupid deserves the downward spiral they are in.
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