SpaceX Cargo Dragon Departs Space Station

HOUSTON—NASA’s 28th SpaceX-contracted Cargo Dragon resupply mission spacecraft departed the International Space Station (ISS) June 29 with a 3,600-lb. return cargo of scientific research samples and hardware for a splashdown off the Florida coast.

The splashdown is planned for June 30 at 10:30 a.m. EDT in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. Once the freighter is secured with NASA personnel on board a SpaceX recovery vessel, the time-sensitive science cargo can be offloaded and flown by helicopter to the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The CRS 28 Dragon undocked from the ISS U.S. segment’s zenith Harmony docking port at 12:30 p.m. EDT in response to commands from SpaceX ground controllers in Hawthorne, California.

The resupply mission was launched from KSC on June 5, delivering a more than 7,000-lb. cargo of crew supplies, science and technology projects and ISS hardware on June 6. The hardware included the fifth and sixth Roll Out Solar Arrays (iROSAs) that were installed with NASA spacewalks on June 9 and June 15 as part of an ISS solar power generation upgrade that got underway in June 2021.

The scientific research headed back to Earth includes samples from Bionutrients-2, a NASA Ames Research Center investigation assessing the potential for providing astronauts on long-duration, deep space missions with on-demand vitamins and nutrients extracted from yogurt, kefir and a yeast-based beverage.

Other returning research includes Monoclonal Antibodies PCG-2, a Bristol Myers Squibb investigation assessing the crystallization of bio therapeutics in microgravity for the production of new generations of medications, a potential future in-space manufacturing possibility. Myotones is an assessment of changes to muscle tissues in microgravity that could have applications in treating muscle weakening from injury and aging on Earth.

Also returning is the European Space Agency’s GRIP - Dexterous Manipulation in Microgravity chair. It was used in a pair of neurology experiments to assess how microgravity affects the human manipulation of objects and how the human central nervous system adapts to the low gravity environment. Both investigations recently completed nearly six years of study.