SpaceX, NASA ready Crew-13 for potentially fastest ISS trip

Six-month mission to study heart disease, Parkinson’s, and crops

NASA and SpaceX are set to launch a four-person crew to the International Space Station on Thursday, with a flight profile that could deliver the astronauts to the orbiting laboratory in less than eight hours — the fastest trip to the ISS ever, according to NASA, if the launch proceeds as scheduled. The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off at 11:10 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov for a six-month stay.

“Right now, everything is ‘go,’” Lori Glaze, NASA’s associate administrator for the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said during a prelaunch press briefing Wednesday evening.

The Crew-13 mission will carry NASA’s Jessica Watkins of Colorado and Luke Delaney of Florida, the Canadian Space Agency’s Kutryk of Alberta, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Teteryatnikov of Kursk Oblast. The crew will spend six months aboard the station, joining Expedition 75 — which already includes three other astronauts — and relieving Crew-12, who have been aboard since February.

“Once our Crew-13 arrives on board station, they’ll quickly get acclimated and we’ll conduct a relatively short handover with our Crew-12 preparing to return home early next week,” Glaze said.

According to Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the six-month mission will include research on heart disease and Parkinson’s disease using human stem cell-derived tissues aimed at improving medicine, disease modeling, and pharmaceutical testing. The crew will also explore crop production for longer-duration spaceflight, investigate blood flow abnormalities seen in space, and test new diagnostic medical equipment for monitoring crew health, Weigel said.

The flight’s potential to set a speed record depends on orbital mechanics. “The angle separation between space station and Dragon is very, very close, and that’s just essentially orbital mechanics that got us in the right place,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, during a prelaunch news conference Wednesday. “There was a recent orbit adjustment maneuver done by space station, and that kind of set things up, and we just kind of got lucky that they line up and work out extremely well.”

The mission was delayed from its August target after an oxidizer leak was discovered in the spacecraft’s propulsion system during environmental checks.

Kutryk, a fourth-generation Ukrainian Canadian, is bringing a 100-year-old pocket watch aboard the flight as a family heirloom, he told ABC. “For me, it’s really neat to look at that and reflect on just how much has changed in those 100 years, a little over 100 years,” Kutryk said at a prelaunch news conference in August. “If that’s how much change [has happened] in the last hundred years, how much more could change if we do things right in the next hundred?”