SpaceX Crew Dragon launches NASA's Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon capsule "Grace" lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, beginning NASA's Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. The four-person crew — NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov — is expected to spend up to six months aboard the station.
The Falcon 9 rocket launched northeast over the Atlantic Ocean despite earlier concerns about thunderstorms and gusty winds at the launch site. The Crew Dragon capsule is expected to take approximately eight hours to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station, where the crew will relieve the Crew-12 team, which launched in February and is scheduled to splash down off the coast of Southern California next week.
Commander Jessica Watkins, a geologist, is making her second trip to space, having previously launched on the Crew-4 mission in 2022 and accumulated 170 days in orbit. NPR reported that she was the first Black woman to serve on the space station and holds the record for the most time in space of any Black woman. Pilot Luke Delaney, a naval aviator from DeBary, Fla., is making his first spaceflight; his former high school, Deltona High School, declared Thursday "Luke Delaney Day." Mission specialists Kutryk and Teteryatnikov are also making their first trips to space.
The crew's capsule, named Grace, is described by NPR as the fifth and final Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX. It previously flew on the Axiom Ax-4 private astronaut mission. This marks SpaceX's 13th operational crew mission for NASA and its 14th overall, counting the 2020 test flight that carried two astronauts to the station.