How to watch the NASA Crew-13 launch

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission launched this week, bringing a new group of astronauts and one cosmonaut to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch is scheduled for today, October 1 at 11:10 AM ET from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and livestream coverage will begin on the NASA YouTube channel, Netflix, Discovery+, X, NASA+ and Amazon Prime Video at 9:20AM ET.

The spacecraft commander for the launch is Jessica Watkins, a geologist, crew member on SpaceX Crew-4 and member of the Curiosity rover science team. The pilot for the mission is Luke Delaney, a research pilot from NASA Langley Research Center, and one of several crew members making their first trip to space, the ISS or both as part of the Crew-13 mission. Other crew members include CSA astronaut Joshua Kutryk, who also completed his first space flight on the mission, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, who will be going to the ISS for the first time.

As part of the mission, Crew-13 is expected to “conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to prepare humans for future exploratory missions to the Moon and Mars.” The crew will also relieve the crew of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission, who had to shelter in place in their capsule briefly when an air leak was discovered on the ISS in June. Contributing to the investment of the launch, NASA writes that the mission’s planned seven-hour, 50-minute journey from launch to docking will be the fastest of a US spacecraft in the space station’s history when it is completed.

While the delivery of astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS occurs on a regular cadence, the Crew-13 mission launches as NASA seeks to complete its much larger goal of returning humans to the surface of the Moon. The agency now doesn’t expect to reach that goal until 2028, but it completed Artemis II, a lunar flyby mission, on April 10, and plans to test lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX during its Artemis III mission in 2027.