NASA sends shipment of supplies, experiments, holiday food to Int'l Space Station

Dec. 21 (UPI) -- A NASA resupply mission to the International Space Station got off the ground in Florida on Tuesday and headed for low Earth orbit with thousands of pounds of cargo, including experiments and holiday fare for the station's crew.

The shipment lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center just after 5 a.m. EST Tuesday, right on schedule.

The mission carried more than 6,500 pounds of cargo -- supplies, food, science experiments and other equipment. It went into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and was expected to arrive at the space station sometime early Wednesday.

On board is a wide range of experiments -- including cells from people with Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis that have been grown in laboratories, a high-tech "tape gun" or bioprinter that can print tissue patches as a type of bandage and investigations into how plants grow in space.

When it arrives, astronauts will also start using a special space detergent to wash their clothes for the first time. Currently, astronauts are limited in their changes of clothes due to limited space in the cargo bay.

"Once proven in space, [detergent maker] Tide plans to use the new cleaning methods and detergent to advance sustainable, low-resource-use laundry solutions on Earth," NASA said in a statement Tuesday.

The shipment is also carrying a variety of Christmas meals for the crew -- including turkey, ham, macaroni and cheese, green beans and mushrooms, cornbread dressing, cranberry-apple dessert and cherry-blueberry cobbler.

Aboard the space station are NASA astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Mark Vande Hei. They're accompanied by Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.

Additional reporting by Paul Brinkmann