Dragon is a spacecraft developed by SpaceX. During its maiden flight in December 2010, Dragon became the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to be recovered successfully from orbit. On May 25, 2012, a cargo variant of Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully rendezvous with and be attached to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX is contracted to deliver cargo to the ISS under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services program, and Dragon began regular cargo flights in October 2012.
The spacecraft is currently launched atop a Falcon 9 Full Thrust rocket. Earlier missions, through SpaceX CRS-2, used the original Falcon 9 rocket. Dragon has been launched on seven missions, with one, SpaceX CRS-7, suffering a launch failure.
Dragon was renewed for the second round of the Commercial Resupply Services in 2016. It is also the basis for the Dragon V2 manned spacecraft, which was selected under the CCDev program in 2014 to deliver astronauts to the ISS.
Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) was a German rocket scientist and one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. Von Braun is well known as the leader of what has been called the “rocket team” which developed the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his rocket team were scooped up from defeated Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. For fifteen years after World War II, von Braun worked with the U.S. Army in the development of ballistic missiles. At Fort Bliss, they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile. In 1960, his rocket development center transferred from the Army to the newly established NASA and received a mandate to build the giant Saturn rockets. Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon.
A Ukrainian Zenit-3SL rocket launches the Italian SICRAL 1B military communications satellite from the Sea Launch platform Odyssey, located in the territorial waters of Kiribati, on April 30, 2009. Sea Launch is a unique launch provider that ships rockets and payloads to be launched from a platform placed at the Equator, providing for optimal payload capacity and direct insertion to geostationary orbit (GEO) without the need to change inclination. Sea Launch has conducted 36 launches since 1999, with four failures.