Congratulations to SpaceX who landed their 50th rocket as part of their CRS-20 mission! According to their press release, on Monday, March 9th, the ISS crew members will use the station’s 57.7-foot robotic arm to capture Dragon and attach it to the orbiting laboratory. At that time, the press release says that the”Dragon will be filled with approximately 4,500 pounds of supplies and payloads, including critical materials to directly support more than 250 science and research investigations that will occur onboard the orbiting laboratory.”

For four weeks, the Dragon spacecraft will stay at the station and then return with more than 4000 pounds of cargo. After a 30 minutes re-entery travel in Earth’s atmosphere, the cargo will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.

This is an exciting achievement for SpaceX as the Falcon 9 booster can be reused and has seen previous launches as it flew December 2019. TheThe Dragon capsule is also veteran equipment as it has flown twice, once in 2017 and once in 2018, according to SpaceX.

This is crucial as the goal of making space travel as affordable as other modern transportation is going to require these landings become common and be perfected. Although these rockets cannot be recovered every time that they are launched, it is still important to remember that these recoveries do provide savings to the customers. Moreover, with their upcoming crewed missions for NASA, they should be able to provide a lot of services to the public and space launch community for years to come. This is a huge step in the space launch community and we congratulate SpaceX for their accomplishment! They have been and continue to be one of the leaders in the new space community with their innovations and products. Keep it coming SpaceX, we are very big fans!

For more information, high-resolution photos are be posted at flickr.com/spacex and webcasts typically go live about 15 minutes before liftoff at spacex.com/webcast