SpaceX cargo Dragon docks with station carrying solar arrays

SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on October 15, delivering more than 6,300 pounds of food, supplies and equipment. NASA’s station blog recorded the arrival at 10:27 a.m. EDT at the space-facing port of the Harmony module.

The completed docking follows the October 13 launch of NASA’s 35th SpaceX commercial resupply mission. In a separate October 15 announcement, the ISS National Laboratory reported that more than two dozen of its sponsored payloads had arrived aboard the spacecraft.

NASA’s arrival report lists the station’s final set of roll-out solar arrays among the cargo. Their installation remains planned for later this fall; delivery of the hardware does not establish that the station’s power upgrade is complete.

The National Laboratory’s research list includes heart-tissue models from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to investigate cardiovascular disease and the effects of cancer therapies on heart function. A Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine experiment will test chemotherapy responses in organoids made from patient-donated colorectal cancer cells. These are the teams’ research objectives, rather than results from the newly delivered experiments.

Dragon is scheduled to stay until mid-November, NASA’s docking post states. It will then return time-critical research and cargo to Earth, with splashdown planned off California.