SpaceX’s next astronaut mission for NASA has a new launch date at last.
The four-person Crew-13 flight to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to launch on Oct. 1, the agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 22).
Things had been up in the air since Aug. 29, when NASA announced that an oxidizer leak had been detected in the propulsion system of Crew-13’s Dragon spacecraft. That leak took the original launch date of Sept. 12 off the table, and we didn’t get another firm target until Tuesday.
If all goes according to the new plan, Crew-13 will launch at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) on Oct. 1 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, riding a Falcon 9 rocket to low Earth orbit. It will arrive at the ISS roughly nine hours later, around 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT on Oct. 2).
You’ll be able to watch all of this spaceflight action here at Space.com when the time comes.
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Crew-13 will deliver four astronauts to the orbiting lab — NASA’s Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, the Canadian Space Agency‘s Josh Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia’s federal space corporation Roscosmos. The quartet will live and work on the ISS for about seven months, performing a variety of scientific experiments and station maintenance work.
Crew-13 will relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission, who have been living on the ISS since mid-February.
The two crews will overlap for a few days. Then Crew-12 — which consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the European Space Agency‘s Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, will come home.