The 34th SpaceX resupply run lifted off Friday at 6:05 p.m. with nearly 6,500 pounds of cargo, including a bone scaffold made out of wood. Wood. For your bones. The press release lists this between the snacks and the spleen study like it's normal.
The spleen study is real. Researchers want to know how red blood cells and the spleen behave in microgravity, which is a question I have never asked and will not be around to hear the answer to. Apparently 41.7% of orbital biology now involves organs nobody can locate on a diagram.
The one I respect: an instrument that measures sunlight reflected off Earth and the Moon with high accuracy. Clean idea. Useful. Then I remember we already know what the Moon looks like, and Dr. Pieter Vossen of the Cape Atmospheric Reflectance Working Group says current measurements are "off by a rounding error nobody asked about."
Dragon autonomously docks Sunday at 7 a.m. to the Harmony module. It returns mid-June off the California coast carrying time-sensitive research, which is NASA's phrase for "blood that goes bad."
Somewhere in that capsule, a small wooden bone is drifting toward a laboratory that has been continuously occupied for 25 years, waiting to be installed in a mouse.
Based on the original article "NASA Science, Cargo Launch on 34th SpaceX Resupply Mission to Station".
