14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) have just confirmed in a new statement that their third resupply flight to the International Space Station (ISS) will launch on Sunday, March 30, at around 10:50 pm EDT (0250 GMT Monday, March 31).
Takeoff will occur from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Florida. The mission was originally supposed to launch on Monday, March 16, but the company decided to postpone it to deal with “remaining open items,” though no details were given.
Following the delay, SpaceX tentatively targeted both March 30 and April 2 as potential launch date, pending approval from the CCAFS. If next weekend's launch cannot go through for some reason, then the Falcon 9 medium-lift delivery system will take off on Wednesday, April 2, at 9:39 pm EDT (0139 GMT Thursday, April 3).
If SpaceX manages to launch the unmanned Dragon space capsule on time, then the spacecraft would reach the orbital outpost on April 2 at around 7 am EDT (1100 GMT). NASA TV will be providing live coverage of the capture and docking procedure starting at 5:45 am EDT (0945 GMT).
Unlike the space shuttles or the Russian-built Soyuz capsules, Dragon is unable to dock to the station on its own. This means that Expedition 39 astronauts currently on the ISS will have to use the lab's Canadarm-2 robotic arm to grapple the spacecraft as it flies past and then move it to the nadir docking port on the Harmony module manually.