Fresh food, science gear and equipment head to space station

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket boosted an unpiloted Dragon cargo ship into orbit Tuesday, setting up a rendezvous with the International Space Station early Thursday to deliver more than 6,300 pounds of research materials, spare parts and crew supplies.

Also on board are two new roll-out solar array blankets, the final sets in a major upgrade to compensate for age-related degradation of the station's original eight solar wings.

Six "IROSA" blankets were installed during spacewalks starting in June 2021. The seventh and eighth IROSA arrays on board the Cargo Dragon will be installed during spacewalks later this month and in early November.

The Falcon booster's nine first-stage engines thundered to life at 6:33 a.m. EDT, throttled up and smoothly pushed the rocket away from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust.

Two-and-a-half minutes later, now out of the dense lower atmosphere, the first stage fell away and headed back toward Cape Canaveral for a return-to-launch-site landing while the second stage continued the climb to orbit.

At almost the same moment, viewers at the Kennedy Space Center enjoyed a stunning view of the space station passing 260 miles overhead.

The first stage landed within a few hundred feet of its launch pad 1t at 6:41 a.m., followed a minute and 10 seconds later by second-stage engine shutdown. A few moments after that, the Cargo Dragon separated to fly on its own.

If all goes well, the spacecraft will catch up with the space station Thursday, moving in for an automated docking at the forward Harmony module's space-facing port at 11 a.m.

The Cargo Dragon is loaded with more than 6,300 pounds of supplies and equipment, including 844 pounds of supplies for the crew, 1,307 pounds of science gear, 417 pounds of spacewalk equipment and 880 pounds of vehicle hardware and computer gear.

Also on board: fresh food for the crew, including "oranges, apples, grapefruit, tomatoes, blueberries, baby carrots and mini sweet peppers," said Bill Spetch, space station program manager. "There's also the always popular pizza kit, cookies and candy, as well as some special holiday items."

The IROSA solar arrays, tipping the scales at 2,635 pounds on Earth, are mounted in the Dragon's unpressurized trunk section.

Each IROSA blanket generates 20 kilowatts of power and, acting in concert with the original arrays, boost power output back to factory fresh levels.

"The new arrays are installed on top, over in front of the existing solar arrays," Dana Weigel, director of low-Earth orbit operations at the Johnson Space Center, said earlier. "The exposed portion of the old arrays will still be generating power in parallel with the new arrays."

"Those new IROSA arrays have solar cells on them that are more efficient than our original cells, they have a higher energy density, and together in combination, they generate more power than what (an) original array, when it was new, did on its own," Weigel said.