ASTRONAUT blood and urine were among the precious cargo carried by a SpaceX Dragon capsule that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on 28 October. Its return from the International Space Station marks the end of the company's first critical supply mission for NASA.
SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, has restored a capability lost since the NASA space shuttle retired in July 2011 - bringing science experiments and other cargo back from the space station. Currently, the only way for astronauts to get to and from the station is aboard Russia's Soyuz capsules, but these don't have enough room to bring back equipment too.
Launched on 7 October, Dragon took supplies to the space station and returned laden with about 750 kilograms of experiments, biological supplies and worn-out equipment. Scott Smith, a nutritionist at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, was relying on Dragon to bring back tubes of astronauts' blood and urine, which he will scan for biomarkers that could be used to monitor the health of the space station's crew from afar.