News and social media representatives participate in a space station and mission science briefing in NASA Kennedy Space Center's auditorium.

News and social media representatives participate in a space station and mission science briefing in NASA Kennedy Space Center's Press Site auditorium in Florida. On the dais from left are Michael Curie, NASA Public Affairs, Julie Robinson, program scientist for International Space Station at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Timothy Yeatman, interim chief scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Sheila Nielsen-Preiss, cell biologist at Montana State University, and Scott Smith, NASA nutritionist at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

The briefing provided media with an overview of the experiments and payloads scheduled for launch on NASA's first Commercial Resupply Services, or CRS-1, mission to the International Space Station. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, built both the mission's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. Launch is scheduled for 8:35 p.m. EDT on Oct. 7 from Space Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. SpaceX CRS-1 is an important step toward making America’s microgravity research program self-sufficient by providing a way to deliver and return significant amounts of cargo, including science experiments, to and from the orbiting laboratory. NASA has contracted for 12 commercial resupply flights from SpaceX and eight from the Orbital Sciences Corp. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/living/launch/index.html. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett