Acra Control is proud to support Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) as they work to become the first commercial company in history to berth with the International Space Station (ISS).

In the coming months, SpaceX will launch its Dragon spacecraft aboard its Falcon 9 rocket from their Cape Canaveral launch site.

Dragon is expected to berth with the ISS a few days later, where astronauts will open the hatch and enter the spacecraft to retrieve cargo.

This will be another historic space first for SpaceX. In December of last year SpaceX became the first commercial company in history to successful launch and safely return a spacecraft from orbit.

Next year, SpaceX will start regular resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS) following the retirement of the Space Shuttle.

Acra Control was involved in testing DragonEye, the ISS automatic docking system for the Dragon spacecraft, on two shuttle missions, STS-127 (Endeavour) in July 2009 and STS-133 (Discovery) in February 2011.

These missions lasted for more than 12 days each during which the onboard KAM-500 was travelling at 17,580 Miles/hr as it covered over 5.3 million miles in a vacuum while exposed to radiation.

The KAM-500 recorded the LIDAR 3D and thermal imaging video of the docking/undocking procedure with the ISS. This data was used to verify approach sensor selection and performance before the Dragon flights.

The historic December 2010 mission was the first time an Acra Control data acquisition unit (DAU) was used in a low-Earth orbit application.

After completing nearly two orbits of the Earth and a successful returning to Earth, Dragon was recovered from the Pacific Ocean.

On board was an Acra Control KAM-500 data acquisition system which successfully acquired and recorded comprehensive data from the flight on an integrated removable CompactFlash memory module. Acra Control provided SpaceX with proven off the shelf hardware.