SpaceX Launched a Rocket Capsule to the International Space Station Carrying Avocados, ants, Shrimp, and a Robotic Arm The payload, set to arrive Monday, includes food like avocados and ice cream for the astronauts.
By Cheryl Teh
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a shipment to the stars on Sunday, blasting off to the International Space Station with a 4,800-pound payload.
The shipment, carried on a capsule called the Dragon, includes avocados, ice cream, ants, and a robotic arm. This is SpaceX's 23rd supply launch for NASA, according to The Associated Press.
It's part of a shipment of food for the seven astronauts at the International Space Station, a research facility whose experiments include learning how to grow food in space.
Aboard the ISS are Mark Vande Hei, Megan McArthur, and Shane Kimbrough from the US; Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov from Russia; Akihiko Hoshide from Japan; and Thomas Pesquet from France.
Vande Hei, Novitskiy, and Dubrov have been in space for 143 days, while McArthur, Kimbrough, Pesquet, and Hoshide have been there for 129 days.
Many of the materials SpaceX is transporting are for research. The Girl Scouts sent ants, brine shrimp, and seedlings for use in experiments at the space station.
One of the experiments is designed to look at how tomatoes and other plants grow in a weightless environment, while the astronauts will use the ants to study the tunneling behavior of insects in space. They'll study the brine shrimp to see whether a colony of crustaceans could eventually be grown in space to provide fresh protein for astronauts.
The astronauts are set to use the robotic arm, from the Japanese startup Gitai, for repairs and menial tasks, the Mainichi Shimbun reported. Gitai's chief technology officer, Toyotaka Kozuki, told the newspaper that future models might be able to move into space independently to repair satellites, build lunar bases, and mine resources from the moon's surface.
The launch was supposed to happen on Saturday but was delayed because of stormy weather near the launch site. It took off at 3:14 a.m. on Sunday from a launch complex at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Dragon capsule is set to dock at the space station on Monday.
