SpaceX Dragon set to return

May 31st, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

LIVE VIDEO — The private space capsule Dragon returns to Earth from the International Space Station, capping off its historic mission with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Astronauts gently set SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule free from the end of the International Space Station’s robotic arm, bringing the first-ever visit by a commercial spaceship to a close.

The unberthing and release of the 19-foot-long (6-meter-long) robotic craft were the first steps in an hours-long process that will end with the Dragon’s splashdown and recovery from the Pacific Ocean. Dragon’s return will close out what so far has been a dream mission for NASA as well as SpaceX. The California-based company is the first commercial concern to send shipments to the station, and the Dragon is the first U.S. craft to reach the orbital station since last year’s retirement of the space shuttle fleet.

If the Dragon returns safely, it will earn another place in history as the first commercial craft to return a shipment from orbit. “Only a few countries have done this, so we’re not taking this lightly at all,” SpaceX’s mission director, John Couluris, told reporters. But even if the craft and its load of experiments and hardware is lost, he said the mission would still be judged a success.

The demonstration flight began on May 22 with the Dragon’s launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission reached its climax last Friday when the Dragon approached the space station and was brought in to its port on the the station’s Harmony module. When station crew members first entered the Dragon on the following day, NASA astronaut Don Pettit gushed over its new-car smell.

Over the days that followed, the station’s crew unloaded a half-ton of food, equipment, experiments and other supplies — then loaded it back up with about 1,600 pounds (660 kilograms) of non-essential Earth-bound shipments. Today, astronauts reversed the process they went through last week. The robotic arm pulled the Dragon out from its port and positioned it for release at 5:49 a.m. ET. SpaceX’s craft then executed a series of engine burns to take itself out of the station’s neighborhood and descend from orbit. It’s now heading toward an 11:44 a.m. ET splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, about 560 miles off the coast of Baja California.

A flotilla of recovery ships is waiting to recover the Dragon and bring it back to Los Angeles, near SpaceX’s Mission Control in Hawthorne, Calif. Some high-value experimental payloads will be unloaded in L.A. and delivered to NASA within 48 hours, but the bulk of Dragon’s cargo will be taken off after the Dragon is transported to SpaceX’s test facility in MacGregor, Texas.

This test mission is expected to open the way for SpaceX to begin orbital cargo deliveries in earnest later this year, with 12 flights scheduled through 2016 under the terms of a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. Another company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., is working on an alternate commercial delivery system, but that system hasn’t yet gone through flight testing.

Such deliveries are part of NASA’s grand plan in the post-shuttle era to transfer space station resupply operations to commercial companies, at what is expected to be a cost far less expensive than space shuttle operations. Theoretically, that would free up money for NASA to concentrate on developing a more powerful heavy-lift rocket and a more capable Orion spacecraft for missions beyond Earth orbit — heading toward asteroids, the moon and eventually Mars.

SpaceX and three other companies — Blue Origin, the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp. — are working on spacecraft capable of transporting astronauts to and from the station, and NASA expects those ships to be available for its use as early as 2017. SpaceX’s crew-carrying craft will be an upgraded version of the Dragon that was used for the current cargo mission.

SpaceX, known more formally as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., was founded in 2002 by dot-com billionaire Elon Musk, as part of his own grand plan to help humans get to Mars and become a “multiplanet species.”

More about the mission:

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com’s science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by “liking” the log’s Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log’s Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out “The Case for Pluto,” my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.