Crew-13

Crew-13 is the thirteenth operational rotation flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to the Station under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Four astronauts will lift off from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 and dock to the forward port of the Harmony module roughly 28 hours later. They relieve the four who arrived on Crew-12 and stay through the spring of 2027, overlapping with Crew-14 for the standard week-long handover.

The vehicle

The crew capsule on this flight is a reuse — its third trip to orbit, the same vehicle that took Crew-9 up in 2024 and Crew-11 in early 2026. SpaceX refurbishes the heat shield and parachute stack between flights, and the cabin’s interior trim is replaced section by section so that no astronaut ever boards a spacecraft that smells of the previous crew.

The Falcon 9 booster is similarly reused. By this point in the programme, booster reuse is routine — the first stage lands on a drone ship in the Atlantic roughly eight minutes after launch, is towed back to port, and refurbished for its next flight. The second stage, which is not recovered, burns up over the Indian Ocean after deploying Dragon into its transfer orbit.

The mission profile

Launch from Pad 40 is followed by a roughly twenty-eight-hour transit to the Station. Crew Dragon performs a series of phasing burns to align its orbit, then executes an autonomous approach and docking sequence. The crew monitors the approach from inside the capsule but does not need to intervene unless something goes wrong.

Once docked, the new crew enters the Station and begins a week-long handover with the outgoing Crew-12 crew. The handover covers experiment status, maintenance in progress, emergency procedures, and the personal knowledge that does not make it into checklists — which hardware is temperamental, which procedures work better than the way they are written.

What they will do

The Crew-13 expedition spans roughly six months and includes several hundred experiments across the US, European, and Japanese laboratories. The crew will support scheduled spacewalks, maintain Station systems, and participate in the ongoing research programmes in biology, materials science, fluid physics, and human physiology.

How it ends

At the end of the rotation, Crew-14 arrives and the handover repeats. The Crew-13 astronauts climb back into their Dragon capsule, undock, perform a deorbit burn, and re-enter the atmosphere. Splashdown is off the coast of Florida, where a SpaceX recovery vessel is waiting. From undocking to being back on a boat takes about six hours.