SpaceX<\/b> capped off 2021 with a Dragon resupply mission to the International Space Station early Tuesday morning. This marked SpaceX\u2019s final launch of 2021 \u2014 a year in which the launcher set a new record for 31 launches of the Falcon 9 rocket in one year. <\/p>\n
The Falcon 9 rocket took off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5:07 EST. NASA<\/strong> confirmed stage separation and that the Cargo Dragon spacecraft is en route to the ISS. The capsule is set to arrive on Wednesday at 4:30 a.m. EST. <\/p>\n Dragon is carrying 6,500 pounds of science, supplies, and holiday treats. A number of science missions are onboard, including bioprinting bandages from the German Aerospace Center<\/b>. <\/p>\n The first stage was recovered on a droneship, marking SpaceX\u2019s 100th successful landing of an orbital class rocket booster. <\/p>\n This was SpaceX\u2019s third launch in just a few days. Over the weekend on Dec. 18, a Falcon 9 rocket launched 52 Starlink satellites to orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Just 15 hours later, SpaceX launched the Turksat 5B communications satellite for Turkish satellite operator Turksat <\/b>from the Florida coast.<\/p>\n SpaceX\u2019s 31 missions in 2021 broke the 2020 record of 26 missions. Of those launches, 17 were Starlink missions, 8 were dedicated for commercial or government\/military customers, and 6 were Dragon flights including the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission that orbited Earth for three days. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SpaceX capped off 2021 with a Dragon resupply mission to the International Space Station early Tuesday morning. This marked SpaceX\u2019s final launch of 2021 \u2014 a year in which the launcher set a new record for 31 launches of the Falcon 9 rocket in one year. The Falcon 9 rocket took off from Launch Complex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}