Dragon made history last Friday by becoming the first privately produced craft to visit the orbiting platform. The mission has been a demonstration of the freight service SpaceX intends to run to the station.
It has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA waiting to be triggered on the successful recovery of Dragon from the ocean. “It’s a very challenging phase of flight. Only a few countries have done this before so we‘re not taking this lightly,” said SpaceX mission director John Coulurlis ahead of the re-entry.
Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) closed the hatch on Dragon on Wednesday after filling it with 1,450lb of experiments and failed equipment that need to come back to Earth. The crews have to un-berth the cargo ship from the platform using its big robotic arm before releasing it to fly free.
SpaceX - Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - has been engaged by NASA to fulfill a logistics role at the station just as soon as it has proved its systems. The current mission was designed to see it complete a final set of performance milestones.
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