Group items tagged

about 1,200 pounds of cargo

including commemorative patches and pins, 162 meals and a collection of student experiments

Most of the cargo's weight, 674 pounds, is in food and crew provisions, including the meals, crew clothing and batteries and other pantry items. A laptop and its accompanying accessories will also make the journey.

then the 15 experiments comprising "Aquarius"

will be among the first payloads delivered to the station on a commercial cargo craft.

competition among students to fly experiments

Soyuz Landing Photos: 31st Space Station Crew Returns to Earth

July 14

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency spaceflyer Akihiko Hoshide 

part of the space station's Expedition 32 mission, and is due to stay for about four months.

18 miles above the Earth today (July 25

 Felix Baumgartner stepped out of his custom-built capsule at an altitude of 96,640 feet (29,456 meters)

freefall for three minutes and 48 seconds

Space Exploration Technologies says it has signed its first commercial contract for a new rocket that will be more powerful than the one that launched the company's Dragon capsule to the International Space Station last week.

loft a satellite for the communications services company Intelsat, using a Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.

Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world and, historically, second only to the Saturn V rockets that launched the Apollo missions to the moon.

Apollo XIII rescue

In 1970, an explosion during the Apollo 13 mission led to one of the most spectacular rescue missions in US space history. The explosion aboard the Odyssey spacecraft left the crew stranded for four days more than 200,000 miles from Earth. An oxygen leak forced the Apollo 13 astronauts to abandon ship and return in lunar module. Against all odds, the three astronauts and thousands of others brought the capsule safely back to Earth. The astronauts were Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, and Commander Jim Lovell, and the mission was to have made the third manned landing of the moon

The SpaceX 3 Dragon commercial cargo freighter successfully arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Easter Sunday morning, April 20

The mission is the company’s third cargo delivery flight to the station.

The Dragon vehicle loaded with nearly 2.5 tons of science experiments

In 2000, a conjunction of the five bright planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - formed a rough line across the sky with the Sun and Moon. Unfortunately, nothing was visible from the earth, because the the line of planets was behind the Sun and hidden in its brilliance. Such a conjunction last happened in Feb 1962 and will not happen again until Apr 2438. Throughout former history, a conjuction event was regarded with foreboding. However, now science can be dismissive. Donald Olson, an expert on tides at Southwest Texas State University, working with the assistance of a graduate student, Thomas Lytle, calculated the stress on the Earth caused by the Moon and eight planets has often been routinely greater, most recently on 6 Jan 1990

Conjunction of the planets

First U.S. space flight