Dragon Capsule Delivers the Space Station's Last Set of New Solar Arrays

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft docked to the International Space Station at 10:27 a.m. EDT on Oct. 15, 2026, delivering more than 6,300 pounds of food, supplies and equipment to the crew. NASA said the capsule attached to the space-facing port of the station's Harmony module, and that this is the 35th cargo resupply flight SpaceX has flown for the agency.

Aboard is the final set of roll-out solar arrays, the add-on panels NASA calls IROSAs. The agency says on its space station blog that they will be installed later this fall, finishing a run of array sets flown up one batch at a time.

NASA says the flight also carries equipment for making artificial retinas in microgravity, the near-weightlessness of orbit, a process the agency expects to help restore vision on Earth. Also on the manifest are heart tissue models grown in three dimensions, meant to support large-scale drug testing on future missions, and materials for studying how a new kind of glass forms in orbit. The agency says the capsule carries brain organoids too, lab-grown clusters of brain cells that it expects to point toward treatment targets for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.

The mission launched Oct. 13, 2026, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA says the Dragon will stay at the station until mid-November, then depart and splash down off the coast of California, carrying back research and cargo the agency describes as time-critical.