SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday, and the most quietly remarkable detail in the whole mission is this: Canadian mission specialist Joshua Kutryk will be floating 250 miles above Earth when his wife delivers their third child in late November. NASA says it will keep him "looped in." Unclear what that looks like in practice, but okay.
Off the Pad, On Time, Skies Be Damned
The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon capsule named Grace lifted off Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, punching through clouds that had threatened the countdown all morning. According to NPR, the skies cleared just enough for a safe liftoff, and the capsule was expected to take roughly eight hours to catch up with and dock to the space station.
The Guardian reports that Watkins radioed back "thanks for an amazing ride" after reaching orbit, which is exactly the kind of thing you say when a controlled explosion just hurled you into the vacuum of space at 17,500 miles per hour and everything went according to plan.
The mission had already been delayed three weeks. NPR reports a leak of oxidizer was detected on the Dragon capsule during processing back in August, pushing the original mid-September launch date while engineers spent what NASA's human spaceflight chief Lori Glaze described as "many, many hours in determined troubleshooting" to fix it. So the fact that it went off without a hitch Thursday morning was itself a minor victory.
Who's on Board and Why It Matters
Commander Jessica Watkins is leading this crew, and her resume is not casual. A geologist who spent years working with NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, she launched to the space station for the first time in 2022 on Crew-4 and logged 170 days in space. As NPR reports, she was the first Black woman to serve on the space station, and she holds the record for the most time in space of any Black woman in history.
Thursday she added another first. The Guardian reports Watkins became the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit. These milestones are genuinely worth marking, even if the country doing the marking has spent most of the last decade actively making life harder for the people breaking these barriers on its behalf.
Pilot Luke Delaney, a retired marine and naval aviator making his first spaceflight, grew up in DeBary, Florida, about 50 miles from Cape Canaveral. NPR reports that Deltona High School, where he attended, declared Thursday "Luke Delaney Day" and students gathered outside to watch him launch. He told reporters beforehand that he grew up watching Space Shuttle launches, and was now going to see it "from a little bit different perspective." That is an understatement for the ages.
Rounding out the crew are mission specialists Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos, both making their first trips to space. Kutryk is a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Teteryatnikov is a former submariner. Neither detail is surprising, given that space agencies apparently have a type.
The Baby in the Room
Let's return to Kutryk's situation, because it deserves more than a passing mention. The Guardian reports his wife Heather is due to give birth to their third child in late November, roughly halfway through his six-month mission. The Canadian Space Agency says it will provide support for the family, and NASA says it will do its best to keep him informed.
This is not unprecedented. The Guardian notes that in 2004, NASA patched astronaut Mike Fincke into his wife's delivery room via radio link during the birth of their daughter. Commander Randy Bresnik, who is now slated to lead the Artemis III mission next year, did the same thing in 2009. The less fortunate case on record belongs to Austrian astronaut Franz Viehböck, whose daughter was born in 1991 while he was docked at the Soviet Mir station and who was not told until the following day. A whole day. You have to imagine that conversation.
Kutryk told reporters before launch that "a lot of life-changing things can happen over six months." NASA manager Dana Weigel seconded that, saying the agency would do its best to keep him connected to his family. Here's hoping the ISS internet holds up better than it does in most American apartments.
Apollo 13 Vibes, But Make It a Choice
The crew leaned into the mission number rather than hiding from it. NPR reports that the Crew-13 mission patch explicitly references Apollo 13, the 1970 lunar mission where an oxygen tank exploded 55 hours in and NASA spent the next four days improvising a way to bring the crew home alive. The crew rode to the launch pad in black Teslas with license plates reading "Lucky 13," which is either very cool or tempting fate depending on your read of the situation.
"We really wanted to honor their legacy, honor their resilience and their grit, and bring a little bit of that with us," Watkins told The Guardian. NASA's Dana Weigel added that the nod to Apollo 13 "represents what we can do when we're faced with extremely challenging and dire circumstances." Given that their own capsule sprung a fuel leak before they even got to the launchpad, the parallel was more relevant than anyone probably wanted it to be.
The Dragon capsule they launched in, named Grace, is described by NPR as the fifth and final Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX. It previously flew four private astronauts on the Axiom Ax-4 mission. This is SpaceX's 13th operational crew mission for NASA and 14th overall, counting the 2020 test flight.
What They're Going Up There to Do
The crew will spend up to six months living and working aboard the ISS before splashing down, likely off the coast of Southern California. They are relieving the Crew-12 team, which has been stationed on the station since February and will head home next week.
NPR reports the science agenda includes a stem cell investigation aimed at better understanding treatments for Parkinson's disease, research into crop production in microgravity to prepare for longer-duration deep space missions, and testing of new medical equipment for monitoring crew health in orbit. Some experiments will use the crew members themselves as subjects, which is one of those details that sounds perfectly routine until you actually sit with it for a second.
The Dingo Take
SpaceX is the one cashing checks here, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what that means. Thursday's launch was NASA's 13th operational SpaceX crew mission, which means the American human spaceflight program now runs almost entirely on the infrastructure of a private company owned by a man who currently holds an unofficial but very real government role and who has been credibly accused of using that position to benefit his own businesses. NASA's own administrator, Jared Isaacman, personally funded and flew on two SpaceX commercial missions before taking the agency's top job. The conflict-of-interest disclosures on that one must have been something to read.
None of that takes anything away from the people who actually launched Thursday. Watkins is a legitimately historic figure. Delaney watched Shuttles go up as a kid and now he's one of them. Kutryk is going to try to be present for the birth of his child from low Earth orbit, which is an absurd and deeply human thing to have to navigate. The crew adopted the Apollo 13 legacy not as a gimmick but as a genuine statement about resilience, and they did it while riding a rocket that had already leaked fuel once. These are serious people doing serious work.
But the program they serve exists inside a political and financial structure that has never been messier, and the cheerful launch-day coverage tends to smooth over all of that. Crew-13 made it to orbit. Grace held together. The skies cleared. Kutryk will get a radio link when the baby comes. And somewhere in Hawthorne, California, a spreadsheet just ticked up by one more successful mission. Everyone wins, in their own way, and some people win a lot more than others.
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