{"id":912909,"date":"2026-10-02T01:46:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/912909\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:46:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:46:13","slug":"spacex-crew-13-astronauts-dock-at-iss-less-than-8-hours-after-launch-in-fastest-american-flight-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/912909\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX Crew-13 astronauts dock at ISS less than 8 hours after launch in fastest American flight ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

SpaceX’s latest astronaut launch just set a new space record.<\/p>\n

The company’s Crew-13 mission<\/a> for NASA arrived at the International Space Station<\/a> (ISS) today (Oct. 1) at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT), 7 hours and 55 minutes after it launched from Florida’s Space Coast<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That’s the fastest any American spacecraft has ever reached the orbiting lab, NASA officials said.<\/p>\n

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\"a\n<\/p>\n

SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon capsule, named Grace, approaches the International Space Station for docking on Oct. 1, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)<\/p>\n

The previous record was 12 hours and 33 minutes, set in November 2024 by SpaceX’s Dragon<\/a> cargo capsule during the robotic CRS-31 resupply flight<\/a>. The fastest that astronauts had made the trip in a U.S. vehicle was 14 hours and 43 minutes, which was achieved by the Crew-11 mission<\/a> in August 2025.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“We got lucky this time,” Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX<\/a>, said during Crew-13’s post-launch press conference today.<\/p>\n

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“The space station was in an opportune spot in space, and the orbital mechanics, the physics of it all, worked out for it to be the shortest launch-to-docking time we’ve had to date,” she said, adding that “this is close to the fastest it could be.”<\/p>\n

Crew-13 didn’t set the overall speed record to the ISS, however \u2014 not even close. In May 2020, a Russian Soyuz<\/a> spacecraft carrying three astronauts reached the orbiting lab just 3 hours and 3 minutes<\/a> after lifting off from Baikonur Cosmodrome<\/a> in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz caught up to the ISS after just two orbits of Earth.<\/p>\n

\"Space\"<\/p>\n

The Soyuz isn’t faster or more powerful than a cargo or crew-carrying Dragon capsule. Rather, the difference in chase-down times comes down primarily to choices made by mission controllers<\/a>; Russia tends to target more aggressive “fast-track” trajectories.<\/p>\n

Crew-13 delivered four astronauts to the orbiting lab: NASA’s Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency<\/a> and Sergey Teteryatnikov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos<\/a>. The quartet will live and work in space for the next six months.<\/p>\n

They’ll relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission<\/a>, which launched in mid-February. Those spaceflyers \u2014 NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the European Space Agency<\/a>‘s Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev \u2014 could return to Earth in their Crew Dragon capsule as soon as Monday (Oct. 5), according to NASA officials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX’s latest astronaut launch just set a new space record. The company’s Crew-13 mission for NASA arrived at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":912910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-912909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}