Four-member international crew to spend six months aboard orbiting lab
The four-person crew includes NASA Commander Jessica Watkins, a geologist making her second trip to space after launching to the orbiting complex on Crew-4 in 2022. Watkins is the first Black woman to serve on the space station and has accumulated 170 days in space — the most of any Black woman. Pilot Luke Delaney, a naval aviator, is making his first trip to space. He grew up in DeBary, Florida, about 50 miles from the Space Coast.
“I did grow up pretty close to here,” Delaney 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.
Joining the crew as mission specialists are Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos, each making their first trip to space.
Their capsule is named Grace and is the fifth and final Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX. Grace has made one prior trip to the space station, ferrying four private astronauts on the Axiom Ax-4 mission.
The mission’s name echoes Apollo 13, the NASA mission in which an explosion 55 hours into the flight in 1970 crippled the crew’s spacecraft and prompted a race to bring the astronauts home safely. While the Crew-13 members said they are not superstitious themselves, they incorporated elements of the Apollo 13 mission into their mission patch to honor 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,” NASA’s Dana Weigel said. “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 will perform maintenance on the orbiting laboratory and conduct science experiments, including a stem cell investigation to help researchers better understand the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, an investigation of crop production in space to prepare for long-duration missions, and tests of 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 launch from mid-September 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. The Crew-12 members are scheduled to return to Earth next week, splashing down off the coast of Southern California.
The mission is SpaceX’s 13th operational flight for NASA and 14th overall for the agency, including a 2020 test flight carrying two astronauts to the station. The company has flown additional private missions to space as well, both to the station and on orbital missions. NASA’s current administrator, Jared Isaacman, funded and flew two of those private missions before taking the agency’s top job.