What You Need to Know About NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 Mission
Four crew members will launch to the International Space Station on NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission to perform research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will serve as spacecraft commander and pilot, joined by CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov as mission specialists.
Crew-13 is slated to lift off no earlier than 11:10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 1, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, joining the station's Expedition 75 crew. The flight is the 13th crew rotation mission with SpaceX under NASA's Commercial Crew Office.
During the long-duration mission, the crew will run science experiments to advance research and technology for future Moon and Mars missions and to improve life on Earth. According to Dana Weigel, manager of NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston, the crew will help researchers treat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem-cell derived tissues, which can improve medicine, disease modeling, and pharmaceutical testing. She added that they will also explore crop production — important for longer-duration spaceflight — help better understand blood flow abnormalities seen in space, and test new diagnostic medical equipment for monitoring crew health.
Support teams are progressing through Dragon preflight milestones and preparing a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster for its third flight. The crew will fly aboard a Dragon spacecraft named Grace, which previously flew in summer 2025 for private astronaut mission Axiom Mission 4. After rocket and spacecraft system checkouts are complete and all components are certified, teams will mate Dragon to Falcon 9 in SpaceX's hangar at the launch site; the integrated vehicle will then roll to the pad and be raised vertically for a dry dress rehearsal with the crew and an integrated static fire test before launch. Meanwhile, NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 is preparing to return to Earth after a brief handover once Crew-13 arrives.
This will be the second flight to the space station for Watkins, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2017. She grew up in Lafayette, Colorado, and earned an undergraduate degree in geological and environmental sciences from Stanford University plus a doctorate in geology from UCLA. As a geologist, she studied the Martian surface and was a member of the Curiosity rover science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. She first launched to the station aboard NASA's SpaceX Crew-4 mission, spending 170 days in space across Expeditions 67/68 in 2022.