Texas: NASA astronaut Donald Pettit has said that the interiors of a Dragon ship of California SpaceX smell like of a brand new car.
Pettit, the first to go inside the docked capsule, said the Dragon looks like it carries about as much cargo as his pickup truck back home in Houston.
“I spent quite a bit of time poking around in here this morning, just looking at the engineering and the layout, and I'm very pleased,” CBS News quoted Pettit, as saying, from the brilliant white compartment.
Dragon, which is the first commercial vessel to visit the space station, is also the first American ship to go to the orbiting laboratory, since the US space agency (NASA) retired its shuttles last year.
According to reports, the Dragon is due to detach from the station next Thursday, when it will re-enter the atmosphere and head for a splashdown via parachute in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California.
NASA is also providing a seed funding of approximately 800 million dollars to SpaceX and another company, Orbital Sciences Corporation, to help them develop new rocket and cargo vehicles.
ANI
First Published: Sunday, May 27, 2012, 14:00