A little while ago, SpaceX’s Dragon 2 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Harmony module completing the first part of its CRS-32 mission. Astronaut Jonny Kim and his colleague Takuya Onishi monitored the operation, but the cargo spacecraft, which blasted off about 28 hours earlier, completed the maneuvers automatically without any problem.
The Dragon spacecraft’s approach to the International Space Station follows a procedure that has become routine but remains long and delicate. The Station’s safety is the top priority, so every little step of the Dragon gets checked. Only if all goes well in the spacecraft’s position and velocity, they proceed with the next step, and in case of any problems can be aborted at every step. The Dragon 2 carries out all the maneuvers automatically up to the docking, and the procedure can be interrupted until the last moment.
Previous missions already provided positive feedback regarding the possibility of reusing the new version of the Dragon cargo spacecraft. In SpaceX and NASA’s initial plans, each Dragon should be used up to 5 times, but the new goal for SpaceX is to use each spacecraft up to 15 times. The newly arrived cargo spacecraft is on its fifth mission. This is the second Dragon 2 cargo ship to reach this milestone after the one that completed the previous resupply mission. This means that SpaceX will have new information about the possibilities of reuse.
NASA regularly publishes the manifest with the full cargo of each American cargo spacecraft. However, in this case, it turned out that the presence of a payload for the armed forces was not mentioned, and its presence was mentioned by other independent sources. During the live broadcast of the CRS-32 mission’s launch, the separation from the last stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which shows the payloads in the unpressurized section called the trunk, was not broadcast. Actually, it’s supposed to be the Space Force’s suite cataloged as STP-H10, which includes various non-classified experiments. In short, it’s not clear why its presence was not declared.
The CRS-32 mission will end in about a month with the return to Earth. The second version of the Dragon cargo spacecraft can stay in space much longer than the first version, but for now, NASA hasn’t extended its missions.
