Seven hours and fifty minutes. That is how long the Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA’s Crew-13 will take to reach the International Space Station after lifting off at 11:10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, October 1, 2026, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. If docking goes to plan at about 7 p.m., it will be the fastest launch-to-docking by a U.S. spacecraft in the station’s history.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket put the capsule into orbit with four people aboard: NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.
The flight up
The spacecraft docks on its own, to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module. SpaceX will watch its automatic maneuvers from mission control in Hawthorne, California, while NASA tracks station operations from the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA’s live arrival coverage starts at 5:20 p.m. After docking, the crew will change out of their spacesuits and prepare cargo for offload. The hatch to Harmony is due to open around 8:45 p.m.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman called the launch “another demonstration of America’s unmatched capability in human spaceflight and the strength of our commercial partnerships.”
Handover and work ahead
The newcomers join the Expedition 75 crew already aboard: NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. After a short handover, the Crew-12 team heads home. That group is NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Crew-13’s research list is varied. Using microgravity, the astronauts will produce human stem cell-derived tissues for personalized medicine, disease modeling and drug testing for conditions such as heart disease and Parkinson’s. They will try a new, mostly autonomous plant growth system and test how plants grow outside dedicated facilities. They will also continue studies of blood-flow abnormalities in microgravity and trial a new inflight device for monitoring astronaut health.
“Each space station mission adds to our blueprint for exploration,” said Dr. Lori Glaze, associate administrator of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate. Crew-13 falls under NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, which partners with private companies for access to space.
