Crew-13 with four astronauts heads to the ISS — Dawn

In the United States, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched with four new crew members for the International Space Station. The Crew-13 mission departed from the U.S. Space Force station at Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:10 a.m. local time.

Crew-13 crew

The crew includes Americans Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Joshua Kutryk, and Russian Sergey Teteriatnikov. They are expected to spend about six months aboard the orbital laboratory, Dawn reports.

According to NASA, the Dragon spacecraft was expected to reach the ISS in about eight hours. Such a flight duration could become the shortest for a U.S. spacecraft en route to the station. Travel time depends, among other factors, on the distance between the spacecraft and the ISS at the time of launch. The previous crew launched from the United States took more than 30 hours to reach the station.

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Crew replacement at the station

Crew-13's arrival was initially planned for mid-September, but the launch was postponed due to a leak aboard Dragon. The new crew is to replace Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Frenchwoman Sophie Adenot, and Russian Andrey Fedyaev.

The Crew-12 crew may return to Earth as early as Monday, although the schedule will depend on weather conditions. The ISS has been continuously inhabited for the past 25 years; the station is planned to be deorbited and subsequently fall into one of the world's oceans around 2030.

The United States and other ISS partners continue to cooperate with Russia on the space station, despite the fact that many international cooperation agreements collapsed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.