SpaceX Flew Astronauts to the Space Station in Under 8 Hours

Keypoints:

• SpaceX Crew-13 docked with the International Space Station on October 1 after a flight of about 7 hours and 55 minutes
• It is the fastest American flight to the station ever
• The old US record was 12 hours and 33 minutes, set by a cargo Dragon in 2024
• Four astronauts from NASA, Canada and Russia will live on the station for six months
• Russia still holds the overall speed record

Getting to the space station usually takes a while. Most Crew Dragon trips take between 15 and 24 hours. This time, four astronauts made it in under eight. The crew launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida around 11 in the morning on Thursday. They docked with the station just before 7 in the evening Eastern time. That makes it the fastest American trip to the station, beating the old record by more than four hours.

The crew rides in a Dragon capsule named Grace. On board are NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's space agency. They are the 13th crew rotation mission for NASA, and with their arrival the station now holds 11 people.

So how did it get so fast? A capsule has to line up with the station's orbit before it can dock, and this time the timing worked out nicely. A SpaceX leader said the team got lucky. When the alignment is good, the capsule can take a shorter path and catch up sooner.

This is not the fastest trip ever to the station though. Russian Soyuz flights have done it in a much shorter time, so that overall record still belongs to Russia. For the crew, the real work starts now. Over the next six months they will run research on human health, crop growth and medical technology.