KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Despite concerns about thunderstorms and gusty winds, SpaceX launched four people on NASA's Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station.
The Falcon 9 rocket leaped off the launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and soared northeast, over the Atlantic Ocean. It will take the capsule about eight hours to catch up with and dock to the space station. The four crew members will spend up to six months living and working aboard the outpost before returning home.
The crew includes two NASA astronauts. Commander Jessica Watkins, a geologist, is making her second trip to space, previously launching to the space station on the Crew-4 mission in 2022, and totaling 170 days in space (She was the first Black woman to serve on the space station, and has the most time in space of any Black woman). Pilot Luke Delaney, a naval aviator, is making his first trip to space. He's from DeBary, Fla., around 50 miles from the Space Coast.
"I did grow up pretty close to here," he said ahead of his flight. "I got to watch Space Shuttle launches, and now I'm going to get to see it from a little bit different perspective."
Deltona High School — where Delaney attended — declared Thursday "Luke Delaney Day" as students gathered outside to watch him take flight.
Mission specialists from Canada and Russia are joining the crew. Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos' Sergey Teteryatnikov are both making their first trip to space.
Their capsule is named Grace and is the fifth and final Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX. It's only made one trip to the space station, ferrying four private astronauts on the Axiom Ax-4 mission.
The mission name is similar to a well-known NASA mission in history: Apollo 13. An explosion just 55 hours into that mission in 1970 crippled the Apollo 13 crew's spacecraft, and NASA raced to find a solution to bring the crew home safely.
While not superstitious themselves, the members of Crew-13 incorporated elements of the Apollo 13 mission into their mission patch, remembering the ingenuity and bravery that saved that crew.
"I think it really represents what we can do when we're faced with extremely challenging and dire circumstances," said NASA's Dana Weigel. "I give the crew a lot of credit for giving the nod to Apollo 13 and kind of giving credit to that and representing that in the mission patch that they chose."
The Crew-13 members will spend their time on the space station performing maintenance on the orbiting lab and conducting science experiments – some even on the crew themselves. They'll work on a stem cell investigation that will help researchers better understand the treatment of Parkinson's disease, investigate crop production in space to prepare for long-duration missions, and test new medical equipment for monitoring crew health.
The mission was delayed in August after a leak of oxidizer was detected on the Dragon capsule during processing. NASA and SpaceX pushed the mission from a mid-September launch to find and fix the issue.
"It took a lot of effort, time, [and] many, many hours in determined troubleshooting to put us on the right path for launch," said Lori Glaze, NASA's head of human spaceflight.
Crew-13 will relieve members of the Crew-12 mission, which launched to the station in February. They'll make the trip back to Earth next week, splashing down off the coast of Southern California.
This mission is SpaceX's 13th operational mission for NASA, and 14th total for the agency. (SpaceX launched a test flight carrying two astronauts to the station in 2020.) The company has flown additional private missions to space as well, both to the space station and orbital missions. NASA's current administrator, Jared Isaacman, funded and flew two of those missions before taking the agency's top job.
Copyright 2026 NPR
