Thursday, December 9, 2010

SpaceX's Secret Payload: Cheese

Hawthorne-based SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight firm headed by Elon Musk, has revealed the contents of the firm's Dragon capsule. The firm--which made history Wednesday by successfully launching and returning a payload to earth from orbit as a commercial entity--said today that the payload of its Dragon Capsule was a wheel of cheese, in a tribute to Monty Python. The cheese was bolted to the floor of the Dragon capsule, which was sent up in a demonstration flight for NASA via SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX's flight made history as the first commercial rocket flight to launch a spacecraft into orbit and have it return to earth; the feat had only been achieved in the past by expensive, multi-billion dollar efforts by the U.S., Russia, Japan, China, India, and the European Space Agency. (Photo credit: Chris Thompson, SpaceX)

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