Filed under: News | Technology News
May 31 2012, 3:20am CDT | by Luigi Lugmayr
After making the historic journey as the first commercial spacecraft to visit the International Space Station, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft will return to Earth today. Dragon has just undocked from the...
Drop to Full Story below YouTube Videos
Source: Next Big Future
This blog is an Amazon affiliate. Help support Nextbigfuture by making purchases through Amazon links on this site. Editor/Authors are : Brian Wang, Director of Research. Sander Olson, Interviews and other articles Phil ...
Full article at: Next Big Future
More like this 1 day ago, 5:47pm CDT
First picture of #Dragon in the ocean as it awaits recovery. twitter.com/SpaceX/status/…
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 31, 2012
This morning, at approximately 8:42 AM Pacific/11:42 AM Eastern, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) completed its historic mission when the Dragon spacecraft splashed down safely in the Pacific. The vehicle will now be recovered by boats and start the trip back to land.

Thrusters will also fire during reentry to adjust touchdown point. Next version will land w helicopter precision #Dragon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2012
Spaceship has departed from the International Space Station. Firing thrusters to deorbit in ~30 mins #Dragon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2012
After making the historic journey as the first commercial spacecraft to visit the International Space Station, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft will return to Earth today. Dragon has just undocked from the International Space Station. Watch live on NASA TV.
Dragon is the only spacecraft capable of returning a significant amount of cargo from the space station. The other cargo vehicles serving the space station - from Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency - can carry cargo up but all are destroyed after leaving the station.
While Dragon was attached to the space station, astronauts unloaded 1,146 pounds of cargo including food, other crew provisions and student experiments. They then packed the spacecraft with 1,455 pounds of cargo that will be returned to NASA on Earth including hardware used for experiments, spacewalks and station systems.
Dragon is targeted to land in the Pacific Ocean, a few hundred miles west of Southern California, at approximately 8:44 AM Pacific/11:44 AM Eastern on Thursday, May 31st. The spacecraft returns to Earth like a burning comet, protected from extreme reentry temperatures by its powerful PICA-X heat shield. The landing location is controlled by firing the Draco thrusters during reentry.
Luigi Lugmayr
Luigi Lugmayr (Google) is the founding chief Editor of I4U News and brings over 15 years
experience in the technology field to the ever evolving and exciting
world of gadgets. He started I4U News back in 2000 and evolved it into
vibrant technology magazine.
Luigi can be contacted directly at ml@i4u.com.
blog comments powered by Disqus