NASA Crew-13 Launch Tomorrow: 4 Astronauts Head to the ISS

Tomorrow morning, four astronauts will ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 into orbit. The NASA Crew-13 launch is scheduled for no earlier than 11:10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, October 1, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, beginning a long-duration science mission aboard the International Space Station.

The crew completed a full dry dress rehearsal on Tuesday, September 29, according to NASA, donning their spacesuits, running air leak checks, and boarding the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that will carry them to the orbiting laboratory. With the NASA Crew-13 launch now a day away and the rocket already on the pad, the countdown is a matter of hours.

Aboard Dragon for the NASA Crew-13 launch will be NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. It is a deliberately international crew — the United States, Canada, and Russia flying together — continuing a partnership that has kept people continuously living and working aboard the station for more than 25 years.

Canadian readers get an extra reason to watch. Kutryk, a CSA astronaut, represents Canada's latest crew assignment to the station, putting a maple leaf on a mission that matters to the future of human spaceflight. For a generation that grew up watching launches stream on their phones, Crew-13 is a reminder that the ISS program is still very much a working laboratory — and a training ground for the Moon and Mars missions coming next.

What Crew-13 will actually do up there

The NASA Crew-13 launch kicks off a long-duration science mission, which means the NASA Crew-13 launch crew will spend months running experiments that cannot be done anywhere on Earth. The current Expedition 75 crew has spent the week on exactly that kind of work: scanning veins with an ultrasound device to study how microgravity affects blood flow, collecting blood samples to measure red blood cell counts, and sampling station water for microbial analysis.

One investigation getting particular attention is the Venous Flow study, in which doctors analyze biomedical data to detect potential space-caused blood conditions such as blood clots or changes to blood chemistry. The research matters far beyond the station: what scientists learn about how the human body adapts to space feeds directly into planning for Artemis lunar missions and eventual crewed missions to Mars.

The crew also spent part of the week testing specialized suits designed to help astronauts readjust to Earth's gravity after months in orbit. These suits may help maintain adequate cerebral blood pressure once on the ground and prevent dizziness or light-headedness at the end of a mission — a small but real quality-of-life improvement for returning astronauts.

The handover: Crew-12 heads home after nearly eight months

After the NASA Crew-13 launch and docking, the four members of the Crew-12 mission will help the newcomers get oriented with ongoing science and station maintenance before boarding their own Dragon for the trip home. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev launched on February 13 and have spent nearly eight months in space.

According to NASA's station blog, the departing crew spent Tuesday packing personal items and cargo into the homebound Dragon, configuring seats and emergency gear, and wrapping up air and water quality checks. Pending weather conditions, they will undock a few days after Crew-13's arrival and splash down off the coast of California.

The rhythm of these handovers is easy to take for granted, but it is worth pausing on: every few months, one crew of humans leaves and another arrives, and the station never sits empty. That continuity is the backbone of the Commercial Crew program, which NASA says has delivered on its goal of safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation to and from the station through partnership with American private industry.

And the stakes of the partnership keep growing. The same week Crew-13 launches, a spacecraft from Katalyst Space Technologies returned to Earth after an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the aging Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — a reminder that space remains genuinely hard, and that the routine-looking Crew-13 launch is the product of thousands of people doing extraordinarily difficult work correctly.

Watch the skies on October 1. The NASA Crew-13 launch puts four more humans on shift in orbit — and one of them is flying for Canada. For more background on the mission, see NASA's Crew-13 mission blog.

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