Four crew members arrived at the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon on Thursday, beginning a mission expected to last about six months. For Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk, that schedule means he expects to miss the birth of his third child on Earth.
The spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:10 a.m. EDT on Oct. 1 and docked with the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. NASA called the seven-hour, 55-minute trip the fastest launch-to-docking flight by a U.S. spacecraft in the station’s history.
The crew includes NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. They will take over station duties after a brief handover with the crew preparing to return to Earth.
A birth expected during the mission
Kutryk and his wife have two children, and their third is expected around Thanksgiving, about two months into the mission, CBS News reported. The Canadian Space Agency expects his stay in space to last about six months.
“Leaving these three (plus one on the way) is the hardest thing I've ever done,” Kutryk said, according to CBS News. His expected absence for the birth puts a personal cost of a long station assignment alongside its scientific goals.
NASA manager Dana Weigel said the agency would try to keep Kutryk connected with his family during the birth, and the Canadian Space Agency said it would support them, according to the Associated Press. Their statements did not specify how that contact would work or what assistance the family would receive.
Kutryk is making his first spaceflight, as is Delaney. Watkins previously traveled to the station in 2022. The Canadian Space Agency describes Kutryk’s assignment as its first astronaut mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which uses commercial spacecraft to transport crews.
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What Crew-13 will do aboard the station
NASA says the crew will study tissues grown from stem cells for research related to heart disease and Parkinson’s disease. Its planned work also includes testing approaches to growing plants in space and examining blood flow and methods for monitoring astronaut health in microgravity.
Those are research plans, not findings. NASA has described potential uses for the work in health and crop production, but it has not quantified an expected benefit from these experiments. Crew members will also perform station operations during their stay.
The flight is SpaceX’s 13th crew-rotation mission to the station under NASA’s Commercial Crew Office. SpaceX provided the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft; the crew and station work involve NASA, Canada’s space agency and Roscosmos. The mission was delayed by about three weeks while a leaking fuel system in the Dragon capsule was addressed, the Associated Press reported.
When the current station crew is due home
Crew-13 has joined Expedition 75, the group working aboard the station. The next immediate step is the departure of Crew-12, whose members have remained aboard for the handover.
CBS News reported that Crew-12 was scheduled to undock on Oct. 5 and splash down on Oct. 6. Those dates are plans, not completed events; the returning crew’s actual departure and landing remain the next milestones.
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