A commercial SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule packed with a robot assistant for the International Space Station’s crew, pouches of extra strong coffee, and a NASA science instrument designed to track the health of plants on Earth left Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 rocket Friday on a three-day pursuit of the orbiting research lab. Riding a plume of orange rocket exhaust, the Falcon 9 launcher climbed into a clear pre-sunrise sky after liftoff from Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad at 5:42:42 a.m. EDT (0942:42 GMT), roughly the moment Earth’s rotation carried the spaceport under the International Space Station’s orbital track. The rocket dropped the first stage booster to fall into the Atlantic Ocean — it was not planned to be recovered — as the Falcon 9’s second stage ignited for a five-and-a-half-minute firing to give the Dragon cargo craft enough speed to achieve orbit around Earth. The first stage’s nine Merlin 1D engines continued to power the vehicle for another 96 seconds, shutting down at 2 minutes and 45 seconds after it had left the launch pad far below. This will be SpaceX's 12th flight so far this year and its third for NASA featuring a previously flown first stage, used to launch the agency's planet-hunting TESS satellite in April, and a "used" Dragon cargo ship that flew to the space station in 2016. Although SpaceX does have one remaining Block 4 first stage – Core 1042 which was used last October to deploy Koreasat 5A – this is not expected to fly again making the CRS-15 launch the last to use a Block 4 vehicle, or any version of Falcon 9 other than the Block 5. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the final Block 4 version of the launch vehicle to be launched, lifted of from the Cape’s Space Launch Complex 40 on a mission to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, June 29, 2018. The mission, part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with SpaceX, saw the use of two flight-proven vehicles — the Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA’s TESS spacecraft, and the Dragon capsule that was used for the CRS-9 mission in 2016. European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, who launched earlier this month to begin a half-year on the space station, is also getting a talking assistant enabled by artificial intelligence. Named CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), the AI robot is traveling to its new home in space later today and will be shipped off to the ISS on SpaceX’s 15th resupply mission (CRS-15) launching on June 29 from Cape Canaveral. “CIMON is similar to Professor Simon [a character that trained Captain Future] and that became the base for CIMON, a TV show from years ago,” said Biniok, who led the development of CIMON’s artificial intelligence technology at IBM Watson. The robotic arm has two end effectors, one at each end of the arm, which allow it to move between different base points around the outside of the space station and to grapple other hardware – including Dragon, Cygnus and Kounotori spacecraft.
SpaceX successfully launches Commercial Resupply Services payload CRS-15 via a Falcon 9 rocket to dock with the International Space Station. The cargo includes CIMON, a head-shaped AI robot designed by the German Aerospace Center to assist crew onboard the ISS.