A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Thursday, October 1, 2026, carrying the company's Dragon spacecraft on NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. Four astronauts are aboard the Dragon, bound for the orbiting laboratory.
The crew includes NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. Their combined presence reflects the multinational partnership that has run the station for more than two decades, with American, Canadian and Russian crew members sharing the same flight and the same orbital home.
The launch was carried out with a Falcon 9, the reusable rocket built by SpaceX, and the Dragon spacecraft that will carry the crew to the station. NASA's image release of the liftoff documents the moment the rocket left the pad from the Florida Space Coast, a launch site that has served as the starting point for many of the agency's crewed missions in recent years.
Crew-13 adds to a sequence of commercial crew flights that NASA has relied on to carry astronauts to the station since the agency retired its Space Shuttle program. The mission continues the rotation of crews that keeps research aboard the station running around the clock, with experiments in biology, physics and materials science conducted in microgravity.
The source material for this report is limited to the launch itself and the crew assignments, and does not include details on the flight's timeline, docking schedule or planned research tasks. Further updates on the mission's progress would be expected from NASA as the Dragon approaches and docks with the station.
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