The Dragon has Landed

Abstract

On May 31, 2012, a cargo-laden SpaceX Dragon parachuted back to Earth after a nearly flawless demonstration mission to the International Space Station (ISS). After splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 800 kilometers west of Baja, California, the unmanned capsule was retrieved by recovery ships before being hauled to the Port of Los Angeles and transported overland to the SpaceX processing facility in McGregor, Texas, where it underwent final inspection. The landing capped a successful nine-day mission that saw Dragon become the first commercial vehicle to visit the ISS, thereby setting the stage for regular cargo missions to the orbiting outpost. The first of these took place in October 2012 (Figure 6.0). In addition to triggering a series of 12 cargo missions NASA had ordered from SpaceX, the Dragon’s landmark mission proved that uncrewed cargo vessels sent to the ISS could be recovered and reused. The flight also boosted the company’s efforts to make its spacecraft suitable for crewed missions. For SpaceX (a contractor relatively independent of NASA) to have developed, built, tested, and flown its spacecraft so successfully, the flight ranked near the top of the list of firsts in the U.S. space program. Dragon’s demonstration mission also marked NASA’s return to flight following the retirement of the Shuttle in 2011 and dispelled some of the doubts among members of Congress, some of whom had voted to cut President Obama’s $830 million budget request for commercial spacecraft development. Under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, SpaceX was contracted to deliver cargo to the ISS beginning in October 2012. The company was also awarded a Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) contract in April 2011 to carry astronauts, or a combination of personnel and cargo, to and from Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The development of the crewed version of the Dragon will be discussed in the following chapter, but for this chapter we will focus our attention on the cargo variant.

Picking up where NASA left off

“Looks like we got us a dragon by the tail.”

Astronaut Don Pettit as he extended the International Space Station’s robotic arm and captured the Dragon capsule.