SpaceX and NASA are preparing to send the next crew of four to the International Space Station as soon as Thursday morning, weather permitting.
The mission, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13, is led by NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, who will become the first agency astronaut to fly twice onboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
She along with NASA Astronaut Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, will fly onboard Dragon Grace to the ISS for a six-month expedition.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled for 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 UTC). The rocket will fly on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad. Docking is scheduled to occur about eight hours after launch, the shortest transit time ever for a Dragon spacecraft.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage about four hours prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 55 percent chance for acceptable weather at launch. Meteorologists are watching for the potential interference from clouds and rain at the pad.
“Over the next 24 hours, a weak low-level disturbance sliding along the south side of the high into the Gulf will bring breezy onshore flow that will continue into the primary launch window late Thursday morning,” launch weather officers wrote on Wednesday.
“Models still suggest the continued threat for onshore moving Atlantic showers along the coast, with the exact timing and locations of this activity the main forecast challenge.”
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1101. This will be its third flight after previously launching 29 Starlink V2 Mini satellites on the Starlink 6-88 mission and Dragon Freedom on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12.
Less than eight minutes after liftoff, B1101 will return to Cape Canaveral and target a touchdown at Landing Zone 40 (LZ-40). If all goes well, this will be the seventh landing at LZ-40 and the 664th Falcon booster landing to date.
Who’s onboard?
The Crew-13 mission is the second trip to space for Commander Jessica Watkins who previously served as a mission specialist on the Crew-4 mission, which flew in 2022.
Watkins, a geologist and avid athlete, spent her time in between missions working as a branch chief within the Astronaut Office and later, did some work in support of the crewed rovers and spacesuits needed for future Moon-bound missions within the Artemis Program.
“I certainly would ideally like to be a servant leader. I think that is something that I have learned through my experiences, but also my interactions with leaders that I look up to and that I want to emulate,” Watkins said. “And that has come in the form of coaches, of mentors, of teachers, and of my crewmates and classmates as well here at NASA.”
At her side in the pilot’s seat is a former test pilot Luke Delaney. Before being selected as a member of the 2021 astronaut class, he worked as a research pilot and aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
Delaney grew up in Central Florida and said watching the space shuttle launches was a big inspiration for him and helped influence his life’s trajectory.
“Growing up watching shuttle launches, they weren’t quite as frequent back then, so it was a pretty big deal if you’re able to catch a space shuttle launch. And they definitely played a part in driving me towards both engineering background a little bit, plus aviation and those kind of things,” Delaney said.
“I think it’s just when you’re little and you see something like that and you’re trying to reconcile that there’s humans on that vehicle and they’re going to go live in space for a little bit and come back, that’s just a huge motivation, inspiration, however you want to put it. So for me, yeah, that was a big pinnacle aspect of going down that track for an astronaut.”
Another member of the crew who dreamed of becoming an astronaut ever since childhood is one of the two mission specialists, Joshua Kutryk. He becomes the second Canadian to fly to space in 2026 after Jeremy Hansen flew with the Artemis 2 crew.
The last Canadian who served onboard the space station was David Saint-Jacques who launched in December 2018 and returned to earth in June 2019.
Kutryk, who was selected by CSA to train as an astronaut in 2017, was previously assigned to the Boeing Starliner-1 mission, but that flight was altered to a cargo-only mission following the significant issues that arose throughout the Starliner Crew Flight Test mission.
“Excited because it’s been a long time, dreamt about my whole life. Been training for it for a lot of years, a lot of years, and you know about the Starliner history because we talked about it last time,” Kutryk told Spaceflight Now this summer. “So for all those reasons, really excited to have it this close. And then also, I think we all, all four of us would say this, we feel proud to be representing our nations, our agencies to be trusted and given the opportunity to do this.”
“Behind me lay all I held dear in life. And what lay before me? Happy child, little do you know what life is — how strangely mingled and how full of change… and now, a farewell to home. It was the darkest hour of the whole journey.” pic.twitter.com/iQOy9G9d9Y
— Joshua Kutryk (@Astro_Kutryk) September 30, 2026
The other mission specialist is Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. He was selected for cosmonaut training by Roscosmos in 2021 and became a test cosmonaut two years later.
He said it was a chance meeting that put him on the path that will soon take him to space.
“In the course of my career, at some point, I had a meeting with a cosmonaut, those are regularly held. And I was told that actually there is an open contest, and one can try to become a cosmonaut, which I did when I was 30 years old,” Teteryatnikov said through the aid of a translator. “And that’s how it all started, and I started my cosmonaut training in 2021.”
The crew will join the other members of Expedition 75 on the space station. After a handover period of a few days, the members of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission will board Dragon Freedom to head back home.
