SpaceX will awaken Florida’s Space Coast before dawn on Sunday as its Falcon 9 lofts the Dragon capsule loaded with more than 5,000 pounds of gear bound for the International Space Station. Scheduled for 2:45 a.m. EDT, CRS-33 is the thirty-third NASA commercial resupply flight and the thirteenth under the agency’s second-generation contract. Once airborne, Dragon will spend about 28 hours chasing the ISS before docking to the forward Harmony port, where it will stay roughly four months while crews unpack cutting-edge experiments and stash home-bound samples.
The SpaceX cargo program
Since 2012, SpaceX has ferried food, spare parts, and science to the orbiting laboratory so that NASA can focus on exploration while paying only for “truck service”. The uncrewed Dragon is reusable, bringing results safely back through Earth’s atmosphere—a feature no other active cargo craft offers. Every mission also provides routine opportunities to test new hardware, reboost the station, and sharpen NASA’s procedures for longer voyages.
Engineered liver tissue takes center stage
Inside Dragon’s pressurized trunk rides an incubator full of 3D-printed miniature livers from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Each tissue slice includes its own network of blood vessels, a first for space-based bioprinting. Microgravity eliminates collapse under weight, letting the fragile vasculature mature more uniformly than in Earth labs. If these tiny livers thrive, they could accelerate work on transplant-grade organs and reduce the wait-list that claims thousands of American lives each year. The project follows Wake Forest’s earlier triumph in NASA’s Vascular Tissue Challenge.
Stem cells racing in microgravity
Cedars-Sinai researchers are betting that induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) divide faster off-world. Previous ISS flights hinted at a growth bump; CRS-33 will deliver a larger batch to confirm it and examine genetic stability.
Faster, high-quality iPSCs could lead to bespoke therapies for heart failure, Parkinson’s, and spinal-cord injuries. The Los Angeles team will monitor the cells remotely, freezing samples for return in December to compare DNA integrity with control dishes kept at their California lab.
Edge computing also gets a futuristic test. Houston-based Axiom Space partnered with Red Hat to fly Device Edge, a lunch-box-sized server hardened for radiation and extreme temperatures. Today most ISS data are downlinked for processing on Earth, delaying decisions. With on-orbit compute muscle, scientists could sift images, run AI models, and tweak experiments in real time—skills that will be indispensable on lunar gateways or Martian habitats where light-speed limits make two-way chats sluggish.
Students on the manifest
CRS-33 underscores how low-Earth orbit inspires the next generation. The latest Genes in Space winners —U.S. middle and high-schoolers— will send bacteriophages to see if spaceflight alters their ability to fight harmful microbes. Meanwhile, Higher Orbits’ Go For Launch! program bundles student payloads from five states, each designed and built after workshop mentoring by astronauts and engineers. Learning that their classroom ideas can fly sparks ambitions no textbook can match.
Every investigation aboard Dragon feeds into a long-range strategy: living and working farther from home. Tissue and stem-cell breakthroughs aim to keep crews healthy on multi-year Mars expeditions; edge computing will let distant outposts operate with less ground control hand-holding. By nurturing student talent, NASA and SpaceX also make sure tomorrow’s workforce is ready for off-planet industry.
What happens after docking
Once docked, astronauts will move the experiments into station racks, regulate temperature, and start data runs. In early winter, SpaceX’s Dragon will undock, perform a de-orbit burn, and parachute into the Pacific carrying frozen liver slices, vials of stem cells, and terabytes of processed data. Scientists will swarm the soft-landed capsule like kids on presents, eager to compare space-grown samples with their own Earth-bound twins.