On a conference call with the media in February, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of flight structure and reliability, said the sending flight was another step toward astronaut launches. Dispatch and team missions use variants of the company’s Dragon spacecraft.
“If we can, we’d like to do a shipping flight first. We think CRS-30 is probably the right time to do it,” he said. “The paintings are almost whole on the platform. [We have] things to do next week, but we’ll be in good shape for the CRS-30. “