An unmanned Falcon rocket launched from Cape Canaveral at 10:10 am this morning on a mission to bring supplies and equipment to the International Space Station.
SpaceX – the first private company to deliver supplies to the station – is the brainchild of Elon Musk, an alumnus (COM’94) of Kingston’s Queen’s University.
One of the recipients of this shipment will be Commander Chris Hadfield, who graduated from Kingston’s Royal Military College in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
SpaceX first put a rocket into orbit in June of 2010 and their second launch delivered supplies to the ISS in October 2012.
Today’s mission will deliver over a ton of cargo that includes equipment for 160 experiments as well apples and other fresh fruit from the orchard of a SpaceX employee’s family.
Commander Hadfield, who frequently posts photographs to Twitter, snapped a photo when he was in orbit above Kingston in late December.
Elon Musk – who is also CEO of Tesla Motors, Chairman of Solar City, and the inspiration for Hollywood’s Iron Man – is the subject of the current Queen’s Alumni Review magazine’s cover story “Rocket Man“.
Both were on Twitter this morning, with Musk tweeting updates as SpaceX dealt with a complication with the Dragon’s thruster pods, soon after it separated from the Falcon rocket: “Issue with Dragon thruster pods. System inhibiting three of four from initializing. About to command inhibit override.”
The issue affected deployment of the craft’s solar panels, but it was reported resolved when Musk wrote to his Twitter followers “Solar array deployment successful” just over an hour later.
The current mission is set to deliver the supplies to the space station on Saturday morning. NASA has signed a contract with SpaceX for it to provide 12 resupply missions to the ISS.
UPDATE: The SpaceX CRS-2 Mission page confirmed that “after Dragon achieved orbit, the spacecraft experienced an issue with a propellant valve. One thruster pod is running. We are trying to bring up the remaining three. We did go ahead and get the solar arrays deployed. Once we get at least two pods running, we will begin a series of burns to get to station.”
Related Twitter Feeds: Elon Musk | Cmdr Chris Hadfield | SpaceX | NASA
QueensU’s Musk Delivers Supplies to RMC’s Hadfield
Storified by · Tue, Mar 05 2013 11:38:58
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Top image: NASA screencap | Magazine cover: Queen’s Alumni Review
