The Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit was a boilerplate version of the Dragon spacecraft manufactured by SpaceX, a space transportation company in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX launched it into low-Earth orbit on the maiden flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, on June 4, 2010. Read more
A FALCON 9 rocket body that was launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, on the 4th June, 2010, for the DRAGON mission, is predicted to re-enter the Earths atmosphere on the 27th June, 2010 @ 12:22 GMT ± 72 hours.
And the billionaire South African native became a laughing stock when yet another of his cut-price rockets - known as "the space bakkie" - blew up while carrying the remains of "Scotty" from Star Trek. But last week the former Pretoria schoolboy gambled everything by attempting to launch a giant version of his rocket into orbit, and won the jackpot. The first private rocket capable of carrying humans into orbit, Musk's 50m Falcon 9 stunned critics by making a successful launch and placing its empty crew capsule into a "near perfect" orbit - 250km above the earth. Read more