Dragon Is Docked and Open: Expedition 75 Is Unpacking CRS-35's Flying Laboratory

October 18, 2026

LOW EARTH ORBIT

Three days after it arrived, the newest delivery truck in low Earth orbit is still being emptied. SpaceX's Dragon cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station at 10:27 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 15 — not today, whatever the weekend news cycle might suggest — and the Expedition 75 crew's job since then has been the unglamorous, essential work of unpacking more than 6,300 pounds of food, supplies, equipment and science, item by item, in weightlessness. CRS-35 is SpaceX's 35th commercial resupply mission for NASA, and on paper it reads like a routine run. It is not. Riding in Dragon's unpressurized trunk is the final set of the station's roll-out solar arrays — the last hardware needed to finish a power upgrade years in the making — and in the pressurized cabin sits one of the most medically ambitious cargo manifests ever flown to the station: hardware for manufacturing artificial retinas, living heart tissue for drug testing, and brain organoids aimed at some of the hardest diseases on Earth.

A two-day chase, finished Thursday morning

The mission began before sunrise on Tuesday, Oct. 13, when a Falcon 9 lifted off at 6:33 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, NASA said. The launch, flown in the dark just ahead of dawn, put Dragon on a two-day rendezvous with the station. According to Spaceflight Now's mission coverage, this flight is the fourth for this particular Dragon capsule, tail number C211, which previously flew the CRS-26, CRS-29 and CRS-33 cargo runs, and the eighth flight for its Falcon 9 booster, B1096, which returned to land at Landing Zone 40, next to the pad, less than seven and a half minutes after liftoff. Dragon docked autonomously to the space-facing port of the Harmony module at 10:27 a.m. EDT on Thursday, ahead of the late-morning target NASA had set for the arrival, with crew members including NASA astronaut Anil Menon monitoring the approach from inside the station. Aviation Week, reporting from Houston, put the cargo at more than 6,300 pounds, including crew supplies, scientific research and the final two roll-out solar arrays. Thirty-five missions in, the choreography is familiar. The stakes inside the capsule keep changing.

The last set of wings

The headline hardware is the power system. The final set of International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays — IROSAs, in NASA shorthand — will be installed later this fall, NASA said, with astronauts fitting the arrays during a series of spacewalks planned for the season. NASA's launch release described the final pair as completing the station's power-system augmentation, increasing the electricity available for research and operations and supporting the station's planned safe, controlled deorbit at the end of its life. The roll-out arrays are exactly what the name promises: flexible solar blankets that unroll over the station's aging original wings, restoring power margin that two and a half decades in orbit have steadily eaten away. Every experiment on the station, every life-support loop, every visiting vehicle runs on that margin. When the last pair is unrolled this fall, a multi-year upgrade that has been flown up piece by piece, a few arrays at a time, is finished — and CRS-35 is the flight that carried the finishing piece. It is easy to call a cargo run routine. A run that completes the power system of the largest structure humanity has ever flown is a strange kind of routine.

A laboratory in the cargo hold

If the arrays are the mission's infrastructure, the pressurized cargo is its argument — the case, made in hardware, for why the station still matters. NASA said Dragon is delivering hardware to manufacture artificial retinas in microgravity, work aimed at helping restore vision on Earth, because the delicate layered structures a retina needs can form in weightlessness in ways gravity disrupts. It carries 3D heart tissue models intended to advance large-scale drug testing on future missions. It carries materials to study how a new type of glass forms in microgravity, and brain organoids — small, lab-grown clusters of brain tissue — that could reveal treatment targets for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis, NASA said.

The ISS National Laboratory, which sponsors research flown through the station's U.S. segment, said more than two dozen of its payloads arrived on CRS-35. Two of them, selected through its Igniting Innovation collaboration with NASA's Biological and Physical Sciences Division, show the direction of travel. Researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center aim to grow vascularized cardiac spheroids — heart-tissue models grown from human stem cells, complete with blood-vessel networks — to build better models of cardiovascular disease and to evaluate how cancer therapies can affect heart function, including drug-induced cardiac toxicity. And the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine will use organoids created from patient-donated colorectal cancer cells to evaluate chemotherapy responses and hunt for targets for new cancer drugs — research that points toward treatments matched to an individual patient's tumor. None of this is a metaphor. It is patient cells, flown to orbit, being asked questions that cannot be asked the same way on the ground.

Not all of it is glamorous — that is the point

A working space station also needs its plumbing minded, and CRS-35 carries that manifest too. Mission coverage of the cargo noted a clamshell apparatus built to hold a failed joint from the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm, removed during a June 30 spacewalk, along with equipment for the station's toilet system and tools for maintenance work aboard the outpost. This is the honest texture of resupply: on the same spacecraft, in the same 6,300 pounds, hardware that might one day help restore a person's sight rides alongside hardware that keeps the station's bathroom working. Both are why the station can keep doing the other. The crews who unpack it this weekend are not sorting cargo into important and unimportant. In orbit, it is all load-bearing.

What happens next

The calendar from here is set. The final IROSAs will be installed later this fall during the planned spacewalks. Dragon remains docked to Harmony until mid-November, NASA said, when it will depart and return to Earth with time-critical research and cargo, splashing down off the coast of California — the return trip being the half of the mission no other U.S. cargo vehicle currently matches, bringing finished experiments back to the scientists waiting for them. Expedition 75, meanwhile, settles into the work CRS-35 delivered: setting up the new investigations, stowing the supplies, and preparing for the spacewalks that will unroll the station's last new wings. Follow the rest of the weekend's developments in Previously's full news coverage.