SpaceX lofted NASA’s Crew-13 toward the International Space Station on Thursday with a century-old pocket watch aboard, a family heirloom on a research flight built for results.
A Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft lifted off at 11:10 a.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying four crew members on a roughly six-month stay. ABC News reported the successful launch after NASA and SpaceX cleared a Launch Readiness Review the day before and declared they were “go for launch.”
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk climbed aboard with a pocket watch more than 100 years old, a family heirloom he brought on his first trip to space. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney joined him, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. For Delaney, Kutryk, and Teteryatnikov, it was a first flight. For Watkins, it was a second trip.
The crew was due to reach the station in 7 hours and 50 minutes, dock around 7 p.m. ET, and open the hatch near 8:45 p.m. NASA and SpaceX said the run would be the fastest trip to the ISS for an American spacecraft.
Kutryk kept the reason simple. “I need a watch to tell time,” he said. The deeper point came earlier, at a prelaunch news conference in August.
He described looking at the watch and measuring a century of change against what comes next.
"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. If that's how much change in the last hundred years, how much more could change if we do things right in the next hundred?"
That is the right frame for a Commercial Crew flight. Hardware, training, and private-sector launch capacity only matter if the country keeps choosing competence over drift.
Just before liftoff, launch controllers thanked the crew for “their commitment to human spaceflight” and wished them “Godspeed.” Watkins answered for the team.
"It's an honor and privilege to represent all of you who have contributed to the success of this mission. With gratitude and grace, Crew-13 is ready to fly."
The mission did not have a smooth path to the pad. In August, teams delayed the flight after finding an oxidizer leak in the Dragon propulsion system during environmental checks. SpaceX also worked through GPS trouble and a rocket engine motor microcontroller problem.
Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, put safety ahead of the calendar at a prelaunch news conference Wednesday.
"The spaceflight gave us some surprises here. But the absolute number one priority for us is to get the crew safely to orbit. We will continue to look at data. We will continue to review information. We'll look back through past records. We'll make sure everything is right, and when we're ready to go fly, we'll go fly."
That is how serious flight programs are supposed to sound. Fix the hardware. Review the record. Fly when the vehicle is ready.
Gerstenmaier also explained why the station and Dragon lined up so tightly for the run. A recent orbit adjustment by the station helped, and the geometry worked out in their favor.
"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. 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."
Once on station, Crew-13 was set for a short handover with Crew-12, which has lived aboard since February and could return to Earth as early as Monday, Oct. 5. Lori Glaze, NASA’s associate administrator for the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, outlined the plan at Wednesday’s news conference.
"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."
The science slate is practical, not ornamental. Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program at Johnson Space Center, described work tied to medicine and long-duration flight on NASA’s website.
"During the mission, the crew will help researchers treat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem-cell-derived tissues that can help improve medicine, disease modeling, and pharmaceutical testing. They also will explore crop production, which is important for longer-duration spaceflight missions, help us better understand blood flow abnormalities that we see in space, and test new diagnostic medical equipment for monitoring crew health."
Heart disease. Parkinson’s. Food production. Blood flow. Better medical gear for the people living the mission. Those are concrete returns for taxpayers who fund the program and for patients who never leave the ground.
November will mark the 26th year of continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station. More than 280 astronauts from 26 countries and the station’s five international partners have worked there. Crew-13’s flight sits inside NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the public-private model that put a SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon on this run.
Glaze tied the station’s long run to leadership and to the next phase of exploration.
"The space station, as you know, is approaching 26 years of continuous operations, where research and technology demonstrations continue to benefit people here on Earth. They strengthen our U.S. leadership in space and ensure that we're ready for sustained human exploration beyond Earth's orbit."
U.S. leadership does not maintain itself. It holds when agencies and contractors clear problems in public, keep the crew safe, and still deliver a fast, clean flight to orbit.
Thursday’s launch did that. The Dragon headed for a same-day docking. A Canadian astronaut carried a century-old watch into a spacecraft built by an American company under a NASA crew program. The work ahead is medicine, crops, and crew health on a station that has run without a break for a generation.
A country that still launches, still repairs what breaks, and still sends people to do useful work in orbit is a country that has not forgotten how progress is made.
