[URL]http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/spacex-iss-orbital-sciences/[/URL]
[QUOTE]Space X is making final preparations for its second cargo flight to the International Space Station, currently scheduled for the end of next week. The flight is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on March 1, and is expected to carry about 1,500 pounds of cargo as part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract. Orbital Sciences, the other company with a commercial cargo resupply contract with NASA is scheduled to test its engines later today.
On Monday, SpaceX will complete a practice countdown at its Launch 40 complex at Cape Canaveral, which will culminate with a brief static fire of the first stage engines. The actual launch is scheduled for 10:10 a.m. EST next Friday. After a roughly 20-
hour flight and rendezvous with the space station, the Dragon spacecraft should dock with the ISS early on March 2.
The first CRS flight for SpaceX occurred last October and though successful, [URL="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/spacex-engine-loss-orbit/"]a malfunction[/URL] shut down one of the Falcon rocket’s nine engines shortly after launch. For the past several months [URL="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/the-rocket-factory-spacex-builds-them-from-top-to-bottom/"]SpaceX engineers[/URL] have been analyzing the data from the CRS-1
flight and the company says it’s found the cause of the engine shutdown. The other eight engines were unaffected, highlighting one of the key features of the Falcon 9′s redundant design where a single engine failure does not end the mission. Though
because of the longer burn required of [URL="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/spacex-texas-rocket-test/"]the eight engines[/URL] to achieve a proper altitude, a restart of the second stage was deemed not possible for safety considerations involving the ISS, and a secondary payload satellite on the flight [URL="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/spacex-nasa-investigation/"]did not reach its proper
orbit[/URL].
The primary cargo aboard the Dragon spacecraft did however make its way to the ISS, marking the second time a commercial spacecraft has berthed with the space station. (SpaceX’s [URL="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/spacexs-historic-rendezvous-with-the-space-station/"]demonstration flight in June was the first[/URL].)
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