Tomorrow dawn , SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida for send the Dragon spacecraft on the fifth Commercial Resupply ( CRS-5 ) delegation to the International Space Station . The launch is presently set for 6:20 am EST , and ( as of the sentence of this writing)weather conditionshave slightly better and are predicted to be 70 % favorable . The launch should be seeable to those within 500 miles of Cape Canaveral for the first three minute espouse liftoff . This will be SpaceX ’s sixth trip to the ISS , and the fifth under contract with NASA . It will take the Dragon spacecraft about two days to reach the ISS after the launch .
This will also be SpaceX ’s first attempt at landing the first level of the skyrocket on a platform out in the sea . SpaceX has been work toward the goal of rockets that can perform control landings , leave them to be reused and reduce the price of each launching . A recentpress releasefrom SpaceX has indicate that the company believes their “ betting odds of succeeder are not great — perhaps 50 % at well . ” Either direction , it will be exciting to watch out !
Thepayloadof the Dragon will include supplies for the work party , along with a figure of science experiments . The Self - Assembly in Biology and the Origin of Life ( SABOL ) experiment will investigate how proteins self - fold in ordination to better understand the mechanism behind the ontogeny of Alzheimer’s . Two experimentswill investigate how cells and organisms are touch by weightlessness , which has implications for the future tense of long - full term outer space travel . Fruit flies will be studied to analyze how resistance is affected by weightlessness , and aproject by studentsin grades 5 - 12 as well as undergraduates will make a slip out to blank .
The Dragon spacecraft will also take the Cloud - Aerosol Transport System ( CATS ) cat’s-paw to space , which will examine pollution within Earth ’s atmosphere and clouds from the advantage point of the ISS . read where and what the defilement is could be utile for those consider the environmental or biologic import of pollution .
It will take approximately four weeks for the Dragon capsule to return to Earth .
SpaceX will be doing a live webcast of the case , start at 6:00 am EST.NASA TVwill also be doing a webcast of the launch , beginning at 5:00 am EST , with a post - launch briefing to follow at 7:45 am EST . NASA will also broadcast the Dragon ’s tryst with the ISS on Thursday , January 8 beginning at 4:30 am EST . you’re able to view all of the events in good order here on IFLScience .
Broadcast live pullulate video on Ustream
