Elon Musk's SpaceX Will Send Ants, Avocados, Ice cream And Robot To International Space Station

On Sunday, a SpaceX cargo of ants, avocados, and a human-sized robotic arm was launched into the International Space Station.

The delivery, scheduled for Monday, will be the company's 23rd for NASA within few years of around less than a decade.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has named the booster-recovery vehicles after the legendary science fiction author Iain Banks and his Culture trilogy.

NASA's Kennedy Space Center launched a refurbished Falcon rocket into the early morning sky. The very first booster arrived straight on SpaceX's newest ocean platform, 'A Shortfall of Gravitas,' while lifting the Dragon spacecraft.

The Dragon is bearing almost 4,800 pounds (2,170 kilogrammes) of consumables and tests, as well as fresh food for space station's seven astronauts, comprising avocados, lemons, and perhaps even ice cream.

Scientists mostly from the the University of Wisconsin-Madison were riding up seeds from mouse-ear cress, a species of flowering plant crop used during genetic studies, whereas Girl Scouts are scooping up ants, brine shrimp, and plants as research participants. Weightlessness will also be applied to concrete, solar cells, and other substances.

The initial testing will take place within the space station. According to Toyotaka Kozuki, chief technology officer of Gitai Inc., future iterations of the company's robot will journey into space to practise satellite and other repair duties.

He stated that a squad of these arms may assist in the construction of lunar bases and the mining of the moon for valuable resources as early as 2025. Mostly the delays took place by COVID-19, SpaceX had to abandon some tests. It was the second attempt after the first was thwarted by bad weather on Saturday.

Meanwhile, after the space shuttle programme ended in 2011, NASA resorted to SpaceX and other US corporations to ferry cargo and people to the space station.