SpaceX plans to launch its next International Space Station resupply rocket early Saturday morning, carrying hurricane-monitoring equipment and science materials for experiments from Sanford-Burnham Institute, the University of Central Florida and a golf club company.

The Falcon 9 rocket is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 2:16 a.m. Saturday with 5,000 pounds of equipment and supplies, in SpaceX's fourth private-sector delivery of goods to the space station. On Thursday NASA was projecting a 50 percent chance of good weather.

The star payload is a weather monitoring instrument called "RapidScat." Once attached to the space station, it will globally measure Earth winds on the oceans. It replaces and improves on several weather satellites that either are old, failing or failed.

"The biggest impact that it will have is this ability to close the gap on seeing things that change quickly like hurricanes. Right now it can happen and it does happen that the [available satellite technology] will completely miss a hurricane as it is intensifying," said Ernesto Rodriguez, NASA RapidScat scientist.

"This is especially important not as it approaches land, where we have airborne facilities, but when it is forming and actually starting to move."

Among medical science materials are those to study bone density and muscle loss in space; research with rodents, fruit flies and yeast; and several specimen plates that Sanford-Burnham is sending to use micro-gravity to study how chemical compounds bind with human blood antibodies.

With that, "You can ask the more complex question of how drugs interact in a micro-gravity," said Dr. Siobhan Malany, Sanford-Burnham's chemical-biology team leader.

In addition, UCF physics professor Joshua Colwell is testing low-energy collisions of dust particles, to better understand planet formation.

The payload also includes more commercial technology, such as a 3-D printer sponsored by Made In Space Inc., a company founded by UCF graduate Jason Dunn. It will give astronauts the ability to create needed spare parts in space, and to study what micro-gravity does to 3-D manufacturing.

There also will be a metal-plating technology experiment sponsored by the sporting goods company COBRA Puma.

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SpaceX rocket to deliver new payloads to ISS