Known as a “Dragon capsule” it should reach the space station on Monday, joining the other Dragon that delivered four astronauts last month.
“Dragons everywhere you look,” Kenny Todd, Nasa’s deputy space station program manager, said.
With Nasa’s commercial crew program officially under way, SpaceX expects to always have at least one Dragon capsule at the space station.
The 2,900kg (6,400lb) shipment includes billions of microbes and crushed asteroid samples for a biomining study, a new medical device to provide rapid blood test results for astronauts in space, and a privately owned and operated chamber to move experiments as big as refrigerators outside the orbiting lab. Forty mice are also flying for bone and eye studies, two areas of weakness for astronauts during long space stays.
