The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, is seen at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 3, 2017

SpaceX on Saturday blasted off a shipment of food and supplies for the astronauts living at the International Space Station using for the first time a vessel that had flown before.

The refurbished Dragon cargo capsule soared into space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 5:07 pm (2107 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"Three, two, one, and liftoff," said NASA spokesman Mike Curie as the rocket blazed a steady upward path into the clouds.

The last time this particular spaceship flew to space was in 2014.

The Dragon is packed with almost 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of science research, crew supplies and hardware and should arrive at the ISS Monday.

The supplies for special experiments include live mice to study the effects of osteoporosis and fruit flies for research on microgravity's impact on the heart.

The spacecraft is also loaded with solar panels and equipment to study neutron stars.

About 10 minutes after launch, SpaceX successfully returned the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a controlled landing at Cape Canaveral.

The rocket powered its engines and guided itself down to Landing Zone One, not far from the launch site.

"The first stage is back," Curie said on NASA live webcast, as video images showed the tall, narrow portion of the rocket touch down steadily in a cloud of smoke.

SpaceX said it marked the company's fifth successful landing on solid ground. Several of its Falcon 9 rockets have returned upright to platforms floating in the ocean.

The effort is part of SpaceX's push to make spaceflight cheaper by re-using costly rocket and spaceship components after each launch, rather than ditching them in the ocean.

The launch was the 100th from NASA's historic launch pad 39A, the starting point for the Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a total of 82 shuttle flights.

Explore further Lightning strike postpones SpaceX launch until Saturday

© 2017 AFP</s>For the first time in the history of commercial spaceflight, a used spacecraft has blasted off on a mission to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).

After lightning strikes delayed the launch on Thursday (June 1), lingering storm clouds parted just enough for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to safely lift off from NASA's historic Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida today (June 3).

The Falcon 9 rocket, topped with SpaceX's first refurbished Dragon cargo craft, took to the skies at 5:07 p.m. EDT (2107 GMT). About 8 minutes after liftoff, the first-stage rocket booster returned to Earth to stick a landing at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. [Launch Photos: SpaceX's 1st Reused Dragon Spacecraft]

A little over 10 minutes into the flight, the Dragon separated from the Falcon 9's second stage, deployed its solar arrays and began its three-day trek to the ISS. On Monday (June 5), the spacecraft will dock at the space station's Harmony module, delivering close to 6,000 lbs. (2,700 kilograms) of supplies and science experiments to the Expedition 52 crew.

Today's launch marked the 100th mission to lift off from Launch Complex 39A, where NASA's Apollo missions and dozens of space shuttle missions were also launched. "For [SpaceX], it's the seventh launch this year, and you can tell that we picked up the rate significantly," Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reusability at SpaceX, said in a prelaunch briefing on Wednesday (May 31).

"We are hoping to stay at this rate through the rest of the year and work our backlog down. We're hoping to also fly more and more refurbished Dragons, and the same is true for the first stages," he said. "The next launch after this is also refurbished first stage."

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a used Dragon cargo craft blasts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 3, 2017. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Another historic 1st for SpaceX

Today's mission is the latest in a series of historic firsts for SpaceX, the private spaceflight company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. In March, the company successfully launched and landed a used rocket booster for the first time. SpaceX is also the first and only company to have landed a rocket booster during an orbital mission (though Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has achieved this multiple times on suborbital journeys). And in 2012, SpaceX's Dragon capsule became the first private spacecraft to dock at the ISS.

With the ultimate (and highly ambitious) goal of being able to reuse all major components of their launch vehicles, SpaceX is now putting the Dragon to the test. The capsule first flew on a cargo mission to the space station on Sept. 21, 2014, for the cargo resupply mission CRS-4, and it returned to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean one month later.

"Once this capsule landed, we refurbished it, inspected it, made sure everything is qualified for the next flight," Koenigsmann said.

But the capsule isn't 100 percent reused parts, Koenigsmann added. Certain parts had to be replaced for a number of reasons, such as exposure to seawater during splashdown, he said, and the heat shield needed to be replaced for safety. "But I can tell you the majority of this Dragon has been in space before and has been docked to the station for a couple of weeks."

The next steps toward full reusability for SpaceX involve figuring out how to refurbish the second-stage rocket booster and the payload fairings — an ambitious but important goal, Koenigsmann said.

"This whole notion of reuse is something that's very important to the entire space industry and NASA as well as Space X and others," Kirk Shireman, manager of NASA's ISS program, said in the briefing. "The idea of reuse is important for economic reasons as well as technical reasons." [SpaceX Gaining Substantial Cost Savings From Reused Falcon 9]

Science on board

Along with food, water, clothing and other gear for the astronauts at the space station, the Dragon will deliver plenty of science experiments.

The experiments on board will support about 220 investigations currently happening at the space station. "They span a multitude of scientific disciplines, including biological research, the physical sciences, the human research that we're doing with the astronauts, the technology demonstration studying Earth and space from the ISS, and then last but not least, the educational activities that students have an opportunity to participate in," Camille Alleyne, an associate space station program scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said at the briefing.

One astrophysics experiment, called the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER), will investigate the possibility of utilizing neutron stars — the ultradense cores of dead stars — to develop a type of interstellar GPS navigation system.

A new, experimental type of solar panel is also flying to the space station on the Dragon. Called the Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA), these new solar arrays are smaller, lighter and more efficient than the current solar panels that power the ISS.

The Dragon also contains some live passengers, including 40 mice and thousands of fruit flies. For a project called Rodent Research-5, the mice will help researchers study a new drug for osteoporosis, or bone density loss. The fruit flies will help investigators study the prolonged effects of spaceflight on the human heart.

More Earth-observation instruments are also on their way to the ISS. The Multiple-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) facility, developed by Teledyne Brown Engineering, contains new high-resolution digital cameras and hyperspectral imagers, bringing new capabilities to the space station's suite of Earth-observing technologies.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.</s>United States-based firm SpaceX on Saturday launched a supply mission to the International Space Station, using its first recycled cargo ship in a bid to bring down flight costs, reported AP. The mission, which was supposed to take off on Thursday, had to be delayed to Saturday because of thunderstorms.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 5.07 pm on Saturday carrying the Dragon capsule. After it delivered the capsule to orbit, it decoupled from the spacecraft and returned to Cape Canaveral for a successful touchdown, SpaceX Mission Control said.

“Dragon confirmed in good orbit,” SpaceX tweeted 11 minutes after the launch at National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The capsule, which was last sent carrying supplies to the ISS in September 2014, has almost the same parts from its earlier flight.

The Dragon, carrying 6,000 pounds of supplies, will attempt to reach the ISS around 36 hours from the launch, reported TechCrunch. “It is starting to feel kinda normal to reuse rockets,” SpaceX Chief Elon Musk tweeted. “That’s how it is for cars and airplanes and how it should be for rockets,” he said.

“SpaceX did a very thorough job in terms of certification of the Dragon and referring it,” Space Station Program Manager, Kirk Shireman, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston told CBS News. “The risk was not substantially more than a brand new dragon capsule.”</s>A refurbished robotic Dragon spaceship rocketed into orbit from Florida on Saturday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher, hauling nearly 6,000 pounds of crew provisions and biological, astrophysics and space technology experiments on a two-day trip to the International Space Station.

The unpiloted capsule soared into a late afternoon sky from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:07:38 p.m. EDT (2107:38 GMT) Saturday, two days later than planned after a thunderstorm prevented liftoff Thursday.

Nine Merlin 1D engines, generating a combined 1.7 million pounds of thrust, powered the 213-foot-tall (65-meter) Falcon 9 rocket through a high-altitude cloud deck as the launcher arced to the northeast, aligning with the space station’s orbital track.

It was the 100th launch from historic pad 39A, the previous home to Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles. SpaceX began launch operations there in February, and has now flown six rockets from the seaside launch complex.

The Falcon 9’s first stage engines shut down and deployed the rocket’s second stage more than 40 miles (65 kilometers) over the Atlantic Ocean, then the booster activated nitrogen cold gas thrusters to flip around and fly tail first.

While the upper stage accelerated into orbit, three of the Merlin’s first stage engines ignited to begin maneuvers to return the first stage to Landing Zone 1, and two more braking burns slowed the 156-foot-tall (47-meter) for a smooth vertical touchdown around 9 miles (14 kilometers) from where the mission started.

The landing marked the fifth time SpaceX has returned a rocket booster to Cape Canaveral — all successful. The commercial launch company has recovered 11 rockets in 16 tries overall, a figure that includes landings at sea.

SpaceX aims to reuse the first stages, an initiative the company says will slash launch costs. The rocket that launched on the space station resupply run Saturday was entirely new, but the primary structure of the gumdrop-shaped Dragon cargo capsule on top previously flew on a 34-day orbital mission in September and October 2014, another first for SpaceX.

Engineers examined and stripped the spacecraft’s structure after it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 25, 2014, following a visit to the space station, but the “majority” of the Dragon cargo capsule is the original article, according to Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s director of flight reliability.

He said engineers compared the structural loads and shaking components inside the Dragon capsule experienced on its 2014 flight with their design limits.

“That tells us how much life the component has, and we make sure that the component has enough life for the next round,” Koenigsmann said. “There is a statistical variation, so you have to make a worst-case assumption, basically, to be on the safe side.”

SpaceX goes through a similar review of parts on Falcon 9 boosters before clearing them for a re-flight, he said.

Kirk Shireman, NASA’s program manager for the International Space Station, said before Saturday’s launch that the space agency expects to approve SpaceX plans to re-fly more Dragon capsules and Falcon 9 boosters on future cargo missions to the orbiting research outpost.

SpaceX has two multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to ferry equipment to and from the space station. The terms of the deal call for at least 26 missions, and 10 of those are in the books, including a failed cargo launch in 2015.

NASA has also contracted with SpaceX to develop a Crew Dragon vehicle capable to ferrying astronauts to and from the space station beginning as soon as next year.

Officials said SpaceX’s next cargo mission to the station, scheduled for launch some time in August, will employ a newly-manufactured Dragon capsule.

“We share the results with NASA, and review them together, and we conclude that we can either fly a component, or in some cases, we have to make a swap with a new component,” Koenigsmann said, adding that such occurrences were “very few.”

According to Koenigsmann, SpaceX technicians replaced several items that were exposed to salt water after splashdown, such as batteries and the capsule’s heat shield. But the hull, thrusters, harnessing, propellant tanks, and some avionics boxes are original, he said.

“I can tell you the majority of this Dragon has been in space before,” Koenigsmann said.

Officials did not say if NASA was compensated for its approval of SpaceX’s plans to launch a refurbished Dragon capsule to approach the space station.

Without specifying details, Shireman said the agreement is part of a normal back-and-forth between the government and the commercial operator, in which one party barters with the other.

The Dragon spacecraft is on a two-day voyage to the space station, where it is scheduled to arrive at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) Monday, when astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer will grapple the approaching capsule with the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm.

“The space station is in excellent shape, ready to receive Dragon,” said Ven Feng, manager of the space station transportation integration office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The robot arm will move the Dragon supply ship to a berthing port on the station’s Harmony module, where it is scheduled to stay for nearly one month.

The station crew, reduced to three after the landing of a Russian cosmonaut and French astronaut Friday, will unpack 3,761 pounds (1,665 kilograms) of equipment and experiments loaded inside the Dragon capsule’s previously-flown pressurized module.

Some food and provisions for the station’s crew are strapped inside the Dragon freighter, but research investigations take up the bulk of the ship’s volume.

“Really, the utility of this SpaceX mission is science,” Feng said. “We have literally tons and tons of science going up on this mission.”

Three payloads stowed inside the Dragon’s external rear trunk will be be removed robotically.

One of the unpressurized experiments, NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, will study the super-dense leftovers from violent supernova explosions. Made of 56 individual X-ray telescopes, the NICER instrument will observe neutron stars, the collapsed city-sized remnants of stars that have used up all of their nuclear fuel.

Scientists compare the density of a neutron star to cramming the mass Mount Everest into a sugar cube. One teaspoon of neutron star matter would weight a billion tons on Earth, according to NASA.

Developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Laboratory, the neutron star observer will spend 18 months detecting X-ray signals coming from deep space.

“Neutron stars are fantastical stars that are extraordinary in many ways,” said Zaven Arzoumanian, NICER’s deputy principal investigator and science lead at Goddard. “They are the densest objects in the universe, they are the fastest-spinning objects known, they are the most strongly magnetic objects known.”

The NICER science team wants to know the structure and composition of neutron stars, which are so extreme that normal atoms are pulverized, freeing subatomic particles like neutrons, protons and electrons.

“As soon as you go below the surface of a neutron star, the pressures and densities rise extremely rapidly, and soon you’re in an environment that you can’t produce in any lab on Earth,” said Slavko Bogdanov, a research scientist at Columbia University who leads the NICER light curve modeling group.

Unlike black holes, which develop from explosions of stars more than 20 times the mass of the sun, neutron stars can be directly observed.

“They emit light all across the spectrum, from radio waves to visible light up to X-rays and gamma rays, primarily in narrow beams from their magnetic poles,” Arzoumanian said. “Just like the Earth, the magnetic poles on a neutron star are not necessarily aligned with the spin of the star, so you can get narrow beams that sweep as the star spins, just like a lighthouse.

“And if we happen to be in the path of the sweep we see a flash everytime one of these beams go by and the stars from a distance appear to be pulsing, so they’re called pulsars,” Arzoumanian said.

Scientists will also demonstrate the potential of using the timing of pulses from neutron stars for deep space navigation.

“We’re going to look at a subset of pulsars in the sky called millisecond pulsars,” said Keith Gendreau, NICER’s principal investigator at Goddard. “In some of these millisecond pulsars, the pulses that we see are so regular that they remind us of atomic clocks.”

Atomic clocks are the basis of the Global Positioning System satellites, according to Gendreau.

Another payload bolted inside the Dragon spacecraft’s trunk is a mounting platform for multiple Earth-imaging instruments, such as high-resolution digital cameras and hyperspectral imagers.

Developed commercially by Teledyne Brown, the MUSES device to be attached outside the space station is designed to accommodate several Earth-observing cameras by providing the individual instruments with pointing, power and data relay connections.

The third unpressurized experiment on Saturday’s launch is the Roll-Out Solar Array, or ROSA, made by Deployable Space Systems of Santa Barbara, California.

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory funded the solar array test flight, which is intended to test the structure’s ability to extend and retract, check its resilience to vibrations and other forces, measure its thermal gradients, and verify it can generate electricity.

The new solar array design, which unfolds like a party favor, could be used on future commercial satellites.

The array launched rolled up in a spool, but the experiment will be pulled from Dragon’s trunk around nine days after launch by the station robotic arm. While remaining in the arm’s grasp, the solar array will extend to a length of about 15 feet (5 meters) and remain unfurled for around a week.

ROSA is important to the space industry,” said Jeremy Banik, the ROSA demonstration’s principal investigator from the Air Force Research Laboratory. “All spacecraft need power, and tradiational solar panels are made with square, flat plates that accordian fold with mechanical hinges.

“The problem is, these panels tend to be heavy and bulky, and we just can’t make them any bigger than what we do today. ROSA solves this problem by shrinking mass by 20 percent and stowed volume by a factor of four over these rigid panels,” Banik said.

Once the week-long test is finished, the experiment will be returned to the Dragon’s trunk for disposal.

Live animals were also aboard Saturday’s launch, including 40 mice inside specially-designed transporters for an investigation into a treatment that could combat bone loss in astronauts on long-duration space missions and osteoporosis in patients on the ground.

Once the mice arrive at the space station, astronauts will treat the rodents with NELL-1, a therapeutic treatment designed to promote bone growth, according to Chia Soo, the chief scientist for the experiment and a professor of plastic, reconstructive and orthopaedic surgery at UCLA.

“Men and women past the age of 50, on the average, lose about a half-percent of bone mass per year,” Soo said. “But in microgravity conditions, the astronaut, on average, loses anywhere from 1 to 2 percent of bone mass per month.”

She added that bone loss in astronauts has “tremendous implications for humans with respect to long-term space travel or space habitation in microgravity because we end up progressively losing bone mass.”

Twenty of the mice will return to Earth alive with the SpaceX Dragon supply ship in early July, the first time the commercial spacecraft has landed with live animals on-board. The 20 mice that come back alive will go to UCLA’s laboratories for additional research and treatment.

The other 20 mice will remain on the space station for more observation and comparative studies with the mice on Earth. All of the animals will eventually be euthanized.

“If successful, this will have tremendous implications for patients on Earth because if you look at statistics … approximately one in every two to three females over the age of 50, or one in every four to five males over the age of 50, will have an osteoporosis-related fracture,” Soo said.

“We are hoping this study will give us some insights on how NELL-1 can work under these extreme conditions and if it can work for treating microgravity-related bone loss, which is a very accelerated, severe form of bone loss, then perhaps it can (be used) for patients one day on Earth who have bone loss due to trauma or due to aging or disease,” Soo said.

A swarm of fruit flies launched to the space station to examine how prolonged spaceflight affects their heart function.

The hearts of the insects beat at about same rate as the human heart, making it a useful analog, scientists said.

Researchers are sending between 4,000 and 6,000 fruit fly eggs to the space station, where they will hatch before coming back to Earth aboard the Dragon spacecraft.

“We would like to understand the role of microgravity on astronaut heart function in order to try to prevent long-term effects when they are in space for long periods and after they come back,” said Karen Ocorr, a co-investigator on the fruit fly experiment from the Sanford Burnham Research Institute.

“But there are real-world implications as well for people who are spending long periods of time in bedrest or immobilized,” Ocorr said. “We expect that what we find in our studies on the ISS will have implications for maintaining cardiac function in those sorts of situations.”

Saturday’s successful launch clears the way for four more SpaceX missions over the next month.

Next on the company’s jam-packed manifest is BulgariaSat 1, Bulgaria’s first communications satellite, scheduled for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center on June 15.

BulgariaSat 1’s launch window June 15 opens at 2:10 p.m. EDT (1810 GMT) and extends two hours.

Koenigsmann told reporters he did not expect BulgariaSat 1’s mid-June launch to be delayed after the two-day slip in the cargo mission’s blastoff this weekend. BulgariaSat 1, which is already being prepared for launch in a processing facility at Cape Canaveral, will launch on a previously-flown Falcon 9 booster.

SpaceX plans its fourth launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 25 with the second batch of 10 small new-generation satellites for Iridium’s orbiting voice and data relay network.

The Intelsat 35e high-throughput communications satellite will follow no earlier than July 1 from SpaceX’s Florida launch base.

The SpaceX launch teams have conducted three launches in the last 34 days, with three more planned in the next four weeks.

Ground crews, engineers and managers are “learning to deal with this operation better and better every time,” Koenigsmann said after Saturday’s launch. “The situation that we launch from both coasts is something that is somewhat new for us.

“We’ve had this with a little bit of separation in the past, and we’ve set up the teams to be able to cope with that, and have the ability to launch from both sites within a short period of time,” he said.</s>SpaceX’s CRS-11 launch on Saturday was a success, bringing a Dragon spacecraft loaded down with nearly 6,000 lbs of supplies and research equipment on board to orbit. The twist was that SpaceX already sent this Dragon capsule up to resupply the International Space Station once before – back in September 2014, when it carried cargo to the ISS prior to being recovered and refurbished post-mission.

The successful relaunch of a recycled Dragon is another historic milestone for SpaceX, which is aiming to reuse various parts of its launch and spacecraft equipment in order to help lower the cost of getting stuff to space. This is key to its aim of making launching a lucrative and profitable business, and also to it achieving its goal of flying missions, including crewed operations, to Mars.

After SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (not a reused one, this time) delivered the Dragon to orbit, it decoupled from the craft about 10 minutes after the original liftoff, and then deployed its solar wings to harvest energy for the rest of its trip to the ISS.

The Dragon will attempt to dock with the ISS around 36 hours from launch, when space station crew will attempt to capture the craft using the facility’s 57.7-foot Canadian-made robotic arm. If this Dragon completes the rest of its mission as planned, it’ll be recovered, refurbished and hopefully reused in a future mission

SpaceX is working on Dragon 2, a capsule designed to bring crew to and from the ISS, and hopes to run test flights with astronauts on board beginning next year.

This mission included an attempt to recover the used Falcon 9 first stage, which was a success. The landing was pretty text-book from all appearances, with the rocket touching down without issue at SpaceX’s LZ-1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force base.</s>The 11th dedicated cargo delivery mission by SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will deliver nearly 6,000 pounds of equipment to the International Space Station.

The spacecraft is set for launch Saturday, June 3, and should reach the space station Monday, June 5. A Falcon 9 rocket will send the Dragon cargo carrier into orbit for the two-day transit to the research outpost.

SpaceX has launched 10 resupply missions to the space station to date, including one cargo capsule lost in a launch failure. One more Dragon spacecraft flew to the space station in May 2012 on a demonstration mission.

In addition to more than 3,700 pounds of cargo inside Dragon’s pressurized cabin, the spacecraft’s external trunk is packed with three unpressurized packages.

One of the instruments, NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), will be mounted by the station’s robotic arm on ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 2, a platform on the space-facing side of the research lab’s starboard-side truss. NICER will study the super-dense remnants of supernova explosions, called neutron stars, and demonstrate how future missions could use pulsars for deep space navigation.

Another unpressurized payload is the Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The new solar array design could be used on future commercial satellites, making the power generators 20 percent lighter and able to fit into a launch package four times smaller than conventional fold-out solar panels.

A commercial Earth-imaging platform developed by Teledyne Brown is also stowed in Dragon’s trunk. The Multiple User System for Earth Sensing, or MUSES, can host high-definition and hyperspectral cameras for Earth-viewing.

NASA has provided a breakdown of the cargo manifest listed below.</s>(Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP). In this photo provided by NASA, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, is seen at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, June 3, 2017. SpaceX is trying a...

(Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP). In this photo provided by NASA, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, is seen at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, June 3, 2017. SpaceX is trying a...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The Latest on SpaceX trying to launch first recycled supply ship to the International Space Station (all times local).:

SpaceX has launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station.

An unmanned Falcon rocket lifted off Saturday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center with a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago.

Eight minutes later, the first-stage booster used to launch it was back home in Cape Canaveral following another successful landing. SpaceX Mission Control declared, "The Falcon has landed." Soon afterward, the refurbished Dragon was safe in orbit.

The booster used Saturday is new, but as is now the custom, returned for a vertical touchdown. It's all part of SpaceX's long-term effort to save money through reusability.

As for the Dragon, when it reaches the orbiting lab Monday, it will be the first returning craft since the now-retired shuttles.

SpaceX has launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station.

An unmanned Falcon rocket lifted off Saturday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center with a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago. When this refurbished Dragon reaches the orbiting lab Monday, it will be the first returning craft since the now-retired shuttles.

The same capsule is back for take two after a few modifications and much testing.

The first-stage booster used Saturday is new, but as is now the custom, will attempt to return to Cape Canaveral following liftoff. It's all part of SpaceX's long-term effort to save money through reusability.

Besides the usual supplies, the 6,000-pound shipment includes mice and flies for research.

The flight was delayed two days by thunderstorms.

SpaceX is trying again to launch its first recycled supply ship to the International Space Station.

Forecasters at Florida's Kennedy Space Center are cautiously optimistic storms won't halt Saturday afternoon's countdown like they did Thursday.

Atop the Falcon rocket is a Dragon capsule loaded with 6,000 pounds of station cargo. The same Dragon made a delivery to the orbiting outpost for NASA in 2014 and then was refurbished for an unprecedented second flight. SpaceX will attempt to recover this new rocket booster for recycling, too. The first-stage booster will aim for a landing at Cape Canaveral following liftoff.

SpaceX hopes to slash launch costs by reusing its rockets and capsules. For now, savings are minimal because of all the inspections and tests performed on the already flown parts.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>Cape Canaveral, Fla., Oct 5 Space Exploration Technologies, the first private company to fly to the International Space Station, is poised to launch its initial cargo mission to the orbital outpost as part of a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to deliver supplies.

Liftoff of the company's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule is scheduled for 8:35 p.m. EDT on Sunday (0035 GMT Monday) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

If successful, the company, founded and run by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, will restore a U.S. supply line to the station that was cut off by the retirement of the space shuttles last year.

Since then, NASA has been dependent on Russian, European and Japanese freighters to service the station, a permanently staffed research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

In May the firm, also known as SpaceX, made a practice run to the $100 billion orbital outpost, a project of 15 countries, clearing the way for the first of 12 cargo runs.

SpaceX is one of two firms hired by NASA to deliver cargo to the station.

Its other contractor, Orbital Sciences Corp., on Oct. 1 rolled out its first Antares rocket to a new launch pad on Wallops Island, Virginia, for an engine test-firing slated for this month or early November.

The rocket is scheduled to make its debut flight before the end of the year.

Orbital also plans a practice run to the space station, similar to what SpaceX did when its Dragon ship docked at the station. If all goes well, Orbital will be cleared to begin work on its $1.9-billion NASA contract to fly cargo to the station.

For Dragon's first supply run, NASA is sending about 1,000 pounds (454 kg) of food, clothing, supplies and science gear to the station.

Unlike previous station cargo ships, which were not reusable and burned up in the atmosphere during descent, SpaceX's capsule returns to Earth.

As a result, it will be able to carry back experiment samples and station hardware that is broken or no longer needed.

NASA contributed $396 million to SpaceX and up to $288 million to Orbital to help the firms develop their cargo ships. The agency is running a related, $1.12 billion program with SpaceX, Boeing and privately owned Sierra Nevada Corp. to design station crew transports.

"There's this burst of creativity going on in the private sector," said former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, who joined SpaceX in March 2011.

"It's analogous to the golden age of air travel, between the two world wars, where people were trying all different things because nobody knew back then what an airplane was supposed to look like," he said at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics space conference last month.

NASA hopes to be able to buy rides for its astronauts on commercial space taxis by 2017, breaking Russia's monopoly on station crew transports.

The Dragon capsule was expected to reach the station on Wednesday. It would then remain berthed at the outpost for about 18 days and make a parachute descent into the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 28.</s>Spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX has just launched its 11th commercial supply mission, carrying with it supplies and a bevy of science investigations to the International Space Station.

In a first for SpaceX, the company is reusing a Dragon spacecraft that has already seen action, having flown to the station in 2014 as part of SpaceX's CRS-4 mission.

The veteran Dragon has since been refurbished, fitted with a new heat shield, and deemed fit to fly again. It will now spend two days chasing down the station before arriving on June 5.

Once secured, the crew will begin to unload the 1,700 kilograms of pressurized cargo, while an additional 1,600 kilograms of unpressurised material will be unpacked from Dragon's trunk using the station's robotic arm.

Dragon isn't currently designed to carry human passengers, but there are two special, tiny "crews" on board that will be part of two key studies into heart disease and bone loss.

Nestled in the Dragon's cargo-hold are 6 boxes containing approximately 4,000 fruit flies eggs and 400 adults as part of the Fruit Fly Lab-02 investigation.

Spaceflight is tough on the human body, and in order to better understand the role microgravity plays in heart function, a research team from the Sanford Burnham Research Institute has teamed up with NASA Ames to study how fruit fly hearts function in space.

"One reason is fruit flies share about 75 percent of disease causing genes with humans," explained researcher Karen Ocorr.

The fruit flies will live half their lives – approximately four weeks – on the station before returning to Earth.

Researchers will examine recorded video clips and tissue samples to observe their hearts' functions, and note how they might have been affected by microgravity.

The flies' offspring will also be studied to see how exposure to microgravity affects future generations.

Also on board are 40 mice as part of NASA's latest rodent research experiment, dubbed Rodent Research-5.

This investigation aims to discover how a protein naturally produced by the human body, NELL-1, can aid in bone growth. NASA hopes to grow bone in space to better combat the devastating effects of osteoporosis.

Bone loss, or osteoporosis, affects many people, especially the elderly, as well as astronauts in space, as microgravity increases bone loss.

During the experiment two groups of mice – one in space and one kept on the ground as a control – will receive doses of a treatment called NELL-1 every two weeks.

Following their second round of treatments, 10 mice on the ISS will be randomly selected to return to Earth as part of SpaceX's first live animal return, when all rodents will receive two additional NELL-1 treatments.

Also tucked inside the cargo is equipment for the first ever, space-based investigation into rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars.

Spinning hundreds of times per second, pulsars sweep bright beams of X-ray light across the cosmos like giant lighthouses.

These X-ray emissions can't penetrate Earth's atmosphere, so the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (aka NICER) will measure the precise timing of these pulses from its perch on the space station's exterior.

Scientists hope to one day use the data from NICER to create a galactic GPS, enabling future spacecraft and explorers to navigate the cosmos.

Lastly, a new type of flexible solar panel called a Roll-Out Solar Array (aka ROSA), will unroll like a giant space party favour, unlike current arrays which are rigid and bulky, and unfold like an accordion.

Once unpacked from the trunk, ROSA will be installed on the exterior of the station where it will undergo seven days of testing.

ROSA's creators believe the array's lightweight design will fit a variety of missions and uses, making future spacecraft cheaper.

If the design holds up, models predict this technology could reduce the cost of solar arrays by as much as 25 percent.

That's a lot of awesome science for one tiny vessel that has already gone up and back once.

About 8 minutes after the launch, the Falcon first-stage booster used to launch the cargo vessel was successfully landed at the company's landing pad, Landing Zone 1.

The goal of reusing old equipment is looking good for the future of cheap space travel. To-date, SpaceX has successfully landed six boosters at sea on two floating autonomous drone ships, and now five on land.

Here's to number six, and hopefully many more.</s>SpaceX launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station on Saturday, yet another milestone in its bid to drive down flight costs.

After a two-day delay caused by thunderstorms, the unmanned Falcon rocket blasted off carrying a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago. When this refurbished Dragon reaches the orbiting lab on Monday, it will be the first returning craft since NASA's now-retired shuttles.

The first-stage booster flown Saturday afternoon was brand new, and as is now the custom, returned to Cape Canaveral following liftoff for a successful vertical touchdown. "The Falcon has landed," SpaceX Mission Control declared from company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and a cheer went up.

The plan is to launch the booster again, instead of junking it in the ocean as so many other rocket makers do. Just two months ago, SpaceX launched its first recycled booster on a satellite mission. Another flight featuring a reused booster is coming up later this month.

This Dragon capsule, meanwhile, came back for take two following a few modifications and much testing. Shortly before liftoff, a SpaceX vice president, Hans Koenigsmann, called the Dragon reflight "a pretty big deal."

It's all part of the company's quest, Koenigsmann said, to lower the cost of access to space through reusability.

The Dragon soaring Saturday has the same hull and most of the same parts from its 2014 flight. SpaceX installed a new heat shield and parachutes, among a few other things, for the trip back to Earth at flight's end. The Dragon is the only supply ship capable of surviving re-entry; all the others burn up in the atmosphere. NASA's other supplier, Orbital ATK, will see its cargo carrier depart the 250-mile-high complex on Sunday, six weeks after arriving.

Besides the usual supplies, the 6,000-pound shipment includes mice and flies for research, a new kind of roll-up solar panel and a neutron star detector.

For now, SpaceX said savings are minimal because of all the inspections and tests performed on the already flown parts. NASA's space station program manager, Kirk Shireman, told reporters earlier in the week that SpaceX did a thorough job recertifying the Dragon and that the risk is not substantially more than if this were a capsule straight off the factory floor. He said the entire industry is interested in "this whole notion of reuse," first realized with the space shuttles.

It was the 100th launch from NASA's hallowed Launch Complex 39A, the departure point for the Apollo moon shots as well as dozens of shuttle missions, including the last one in 2011. SpaceX now leases the pad from NASA; the company's first launch from there was in February.

SpaceX has been hauling station supplies for NASA for five years, both up and down. This is the company's 11th mission under a NASA contract. The company's next step is to deliver astronauts using modified Dragons. That could occur as early as next year.

Until SpaceX and Boeing start transporting crews, astronauts will continue to ride Russian rockets. On Friday, a Russian and Frenchman returned from the space station in their Soyuz capsule, leaving two Americans and a Russian behind. The station was zooming over Oman in the Persian Gulf when the Falcon took flight.
SpaceX launches a Falcon 9 rocket with a shipment of food and supplies in a refurbished Dragon cargo capsule for the International Space Station. The mission reuses a Dragon cargo vessel that was previously flown in a September 2014 mission.