14 DAY TRIAL // The Dragon capsule reentered Earth's atmosphere successfully yesterday, May 31, after being separated from the Harmony module on the International Space Station on Thursday. The unmanned spacecraft landed a few hundred miles off the coasts of Baja California, Mexico, at 11:42 am EDT (1542 GMT).
The event was hailed by officials at both NASA and Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), the company that develops Dragon and its carrier rocket, the Falcon 9. Both vehicles performed very well following their May 22 launch.
Dragon was the first private spacecraft to successfully dock to the ISS. It was developed by SpaceX under a $1.6 billion Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract with NASA. Under the agreement, the company needs to conduct 12 resupply flights to the orbital lab.
The capsule is currently being towed to a Los Angeles-area port. It will then be prepared for transport to McGregor, Texas, where SpaceX's processing and test facilities are located. Dragon vehicles are reusable, and this particular spacecraft will most likely fly to the ISS again soon.
The Dragon delivered a total of 460 kilograms (1,014 pounds) of cargo to the station, including food, clothes and technology. All supplies were non-essential, due to the fact that this was only a test mission that could have been aborted at any time.
Expedition 31 crew members loaded a number of science experiments and unneeded items onto the vehicle before it was unberthed. Most of these experiments are to be returned to NASA within 48 hours after landing.
“Congratulations to the teams at SpaceX and NASA who worked hard to make this first commercial mission to the International Space Station an overwhelming success,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said after the flight was completed.
“This successful splashdown and the many other achievements of this mission herald a new era in US commercial spaceflight. American innovation and inspiration have once again shown their great strength in the design and operation of a new generation of vehicles to carry cargo to our laboratory in space,” the top NASA official said.
“Now more than ever we're counting on the inventiveness of American companies and American workers to make the International Space Station and other low Earth orbit destinations accessible to any and all who have dreams of space travel,” he concluded.