A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft launched early Aug. 24 will not only deliver supplies and experiments to the International Space Station but also help the station maintain its orbit.

This post is only available to members.

Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...