Featured Image Credit: JIM WATSON / Contributor via Getty
NASA and SpaceX are gearing up to send another crew to the International Space Station, and the agency has just set out when the public will get its first proper look at the mission.
The Crew-13 rotation is the latest in the run of SpaceX flights now doing the heavy lifting of keeping the ageing station staffed, and it is due to launch no earlier than mid-September.
Before the launch, NASA and its partners will hold two news conferences on Monday 3 August at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Mission leadership will run through an overview of the flight at 12pm EDT, and the crew themselves will talk through their training and preparations at 2pm.
It is Crew-13's final media availability before the team heads to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch, and both events will be streamed live on NASA's website.
Advert
The crew will ride a SpaceX Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. These Commercial Crew flights have quietly become NASA's workhorse for getting people to orbit, the same Dragon system that brought home the two astronauts left 'stranded' when Boeing's Starliner ran into trouble.
The ISS is also approaching the end of its life, with NASA planning to deorbit it around 2030 and steer it down into a remote stretch of the Pacific. S rotations like Crew-13 are part of the station's closing years, keeping the orbiting laboratory running and its experiments going while there is still time.
The mission carries NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.
Watkins is the most experienced of the group and the only one who has been up before. Selected by NASA in 2017, she spent 170 days in space on the Crew-4 mission across Expeditions 67 and 68 in 2022, and Crew-13 will make her the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a Dragon spacecraft twice. For Delaney, it is a first spaceflight.
It is also a debut for Kutryk, who flew as a CF-18 fighter pilot in support of Canada's NATO, UN and North American Aerospace Defense Command commitments before his selection as a CSA astronaut in 2017. Teteryatnikov is heading to orbit for the first time as well. He graduated from the Naval Academy in St Petersburg in 2011 as an engineer specialising in ship power plant operations, working in various naval engineering roles before being chosen for Russia's cosmonaut corps in 2021 and serving as a test cosmonaut since 2023.
Assuming the schedule holds, the four will be among the last crews to call the ISS home before it makes its final descent.
