(NBC) – Crew members on board the International Space Station closed the hatch on the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Thursday, prepping the unmanned capsule for its journey back to earth.
The capsule’s voyage marks a key milestone for Elon Musk’s space company and NASA’S long-delayed goal to resume human spaceflight from U.S. soil later this year.
The 16-foot tall capsule docked at the space station on Sunday after lifting off a day earlier from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center atop a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a test dummy nicknamed “Ripley.”
During its five-day stay, U.S. Astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian Astronaut David Saint-Jacques ran tests and inspected Crew Dragon’s cabin.
SpaceX said the spacesuit for Ripley, apparently a reference to the protagonist in the science fiction movie “Alien,” has been embedded with sensors around its head, neck, and spine to monitor how a flight would feel for a human.
The capsule will undock from the space station early on Friday morning, orbiting the earth a few times before splashing into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.
NASA has awarded SpaceX and Boeing almost $7 billion dollars to build competing rocket and capsule systems to launch astronauts into orbit from American soil for the first time since the U.S. Space Shuttle was retired from service in 2011.
© 2024 KOBI-TV NBC5. All rights reserved unless otherwise stated.