5 weird things launching into space on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft Monday

SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets will someday be able to land on hydraulic legs, dramatically cutting the cost of sending cargo -- and even human beings -- into space.

When private spaceflight company SpaceX launches its newest mission to the International Space Station it will carry some strange cargo to space.

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket on Monday on its third official resupply trip to the space station. Liftoff is set for 4:58 p.m. EDT (2058 GMT). Among the 5,000 lbs. of cargo riding aboard Dragon are a set of legs for a robotic astronaut, an experimental mini-farm for space vegetables and a wealth of other odd items.

Here are the five strange things flying to space with Dragon:

A robotic astronaut's legsNASA's humanoid robot Robonaut 2 designed to eventually help astronauts with menial tasks in space is getting space legs for the first time. The long lower limbs are flying to the station with SpaceX, and they will be attached and initially tested in June.

Once attached, Robonaut 2's leg span will reach about 9 feet, and each leg has seven joints. The legs should allow for enough flexibility to let Robonaut 2 work outside and inside the International Space Station, however, the robot's torso will need some upgrades before it can venture outside of the station, NASA officials have said.

The space station's very own laserThe space station is about to get anew laser communications experiment. Called OPALS, NASA's Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science, the new laser will help scientists test ways of transferring information more quickly than traditional radio transmission. The new form of communication could aid in future missions to more distant deep-space destinations.

Many existing deep-space missions send 200 to 400 kilobits of data per second, however, OPALS will up that data rate to a speed of up to 50 megabits per second. Future optical communication designs could reach rates of a gigabit per second.

Microbes collected by cheerleaders and the publicScience Cheerleader a group of science-minded current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders helped craft an experiment that will take 48 microbe samples swabbed from historical places into space.

Called Project MERCCURI (short for Microbial Ecology Research Combining Citizen and University Researchers), the experiment is designed to help collect more data on how microbes behave in microgravity. Science Cheerleader partnered with SciStarter.com and the University of California, Davis, for the project.

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5 weird things launching into space on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft Monday