Three astronauts and one cosmonaut are heading to the International Space Station on Thursday.
SpaceX
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission launches this week, bringing a new group of astronauts and one cosmonaut to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch is scheduled for today, October 1 at 11:10AM ET at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and livestream coverage will start on the NASA YouTube channel, Netflix, Discovery+, X, NASA+ and Amazon Prime Video at 9:20AM ET.
The spacecraft commander for the launch is Jessica Watkins, a geologist, crew member on SpaceX Crew-4 and member of the Curiosity rover science team. The pilot for the mission is Luke Delaney, a research pilot from NASA’s Langley Research Center, and one of several crew members making their first trip to space, the ISS or both as part of the Crew-13 mission. Other crew members include CSA astronaut Joshua Kutryk, who’s also completing his first spaceflight on the mission, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, who’s heading to the ISS for the first time.
As part of the mission, Crew-13 is expected to “conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the Moon and Mars.” The crew will also relieve the crew of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission, who briefly had to shelter in place in their capsule when an air leak was discovered on the ISS in June. Adding to the stakes of the launch, NASA writes that the mission’s planned seven-hour, 50-minute trip from launching to docking will be the fastest by a US spacecraft in space station history once it’s completed.
While ferrying astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS happens on a regular cadence, the Crew-13 mission is launching as NASA tries to complete its much larger goal of returning humans to the surface of the moon. The agency now doesn’t expect to reach that goal until 2028, but it completed Artemis II, a lunar flyby mission, on April 10, and plans to test lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX during its Artemis III mission in 2027.