The first commercial cargo flight to the International Space Station lifted off on Sunday evening, inaugurating a new era for NASA in which private companies will take over the transportation of people and supplies to low-Earth orbit.
For this launch, only cargo is going; private transportation for astronauts is still several years away. Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif. — SpaceX, for short — launched its Falcon 9 rocket on schedule at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The rocket is carrying a capsule called Dragon that contains about 1,000 pounds of food, clothing, equipment and science experiments, including 23 designed and built by students. The cargo also includes a freezer that can store laboratory samples at temperatures as low as 300 degrees below zero. The goods are scheduled to reach the space station on Wednesday, and the capsule will stay docked for a few weeks.
"It actually marks the beginning of true commercial spaceflight to take cargo to the International Space Station for us," Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, said during a video chat on Google Plus on Friday.
SpaceX successfully launched a capsule to the space station in a test flight in May, but Sunday's launching is the first of a dozen flights under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA.
The student projects come through a program run by NanoRacks, a company that arranges for experiments to fly to the space station, and the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. They include one from middle school students in Santa Monica, Calif., who want to know whether Silly Putty — a non-Newtonian dilatant fluid, in scientific terms — has different properties in the weightlessness of space than it does on Earth.
Under the plans, the SpaceX spacecraft will return to Earth near the end of October and splash down about 250 miles off the coast of Southern California. A successful mission would restore some of NASA's ability to bring back items from the space station, which it lost with the termination of the space shuttle program last year.
A second company, the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Vienna, Va., is preparing its rocket for a test flight this year.
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