Crew-13's Four: Watkins Returns, Kutryk Makes History

HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Behind every Crew Dragon launch is a four-person story, and the team strapping into the capsule Grace for Thursday's Crew-13 flight to the space station brings a mix of veteran steadiness and genuine firsts.

Leading the mission is NASA commander Jessica Watkins, who is set to become the first NASA astronaut to launch twice aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Her return flight is a quiet marker of how far the partnership between NASA and SpaceX has matured: a vehicle that was experimental a few years ago is now carrying repeat fliers on routine rotations.

A New Pilot and a Canadian First

In the pilot's seat is NASA's Luke Delaney, a former Marine Corps test pilot making his first trip to orbit. Alongside him, mission specialist Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency is poised to make history as the first Canadian to reach orbit through NASA's Commercial Crew Program — a milestone for a partner nation that has long flown its astronauts on others' rockets.

Rounding out the crew is Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, whose seat reflects the seat-swap agreement that keeps both American and Russian crew members aboard each other's vehicles. On a day of national-security launches and commercial flights, the Crew-13 manifest is a reminder that the station remains one of the few places where that cooperation still holds.

The Capsule Called Grace

The spacecraft itself has a comeback story. Grace was originally set to fly in mid-September before engineers caught a propulsion-system leak during pre-flight checks and stood the mission down. Rather than press ahead, SpaceX pulled the suspect hardware, replaced it and re-qualified the system — a decision that pushed the launch back by a few weeks but kept the company's crewed safety record intact.

That margin-first approach is the same one that has let SpaceX build the cadence it now runs across both coasts, launching astronauts, satellites and national-security payloads on overlapping schedules.

Six Months of Science

Once aboard, the four will join Expedition 75 for a roughly six-month stay, running hundreds of experiments in biology, materials science and human health that depend on sustained microgravity. Mission details and crew biographies are published on SpaceX's official Crew-13 page.

For Watkins, Delaney, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov, the next step is the simplest and the hardest: wait for the countdown, and trust the machine that thousands of SpaceX engineers have spent the week making ready.