The SpaceX Dragon cargo ship pulls away from the space station moments after detaching from the front port of the Harmony module during an orbital sunrise. Credit: NASA TV At 11:00 am EDT (8:00 a.m. PDT) on Friday, August 19, flight controllers on the ground sent commands to release the uncrewed SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the forward port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module. The station was flying about 259 miles above the Pacific Ocean at the time of release at 11:05 a.m. The Dragon spacecraft successfully departed the space station a month after arriving at the orbiting lab to deliver about 5,800 pounds of cargo and crew supplies, including about 4,000 pounds of scientific research. Today, ground controllers at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, will give a burn from orbit. After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft will perform a parachute launch off the coast of Florida. NASA TV will not broadcast the burn and collapse from orbit, and updates will be posted on the agency’s space station blog. Dragon arrived at the space station on July 16, after launching two days earlier on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the company’s 25th commercial resupply mission to the space station for NASA.
