Overview
- The Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts docked to the Harmony module on Thursday after about a 7 hour 55 minute flight, which NASA confirmed is the fastest docking to the ISS by a U.S. spacecraft.
- Launch followed a roughly three‑week delay while technicians repaired a detected propellant-system leak on the Dragon spacecraft before setting a new liftoff date from Cape Canaveral.
- The international Crew‑13 — commander Jessica Watkins, pilot Luke Delaney, Canada’s Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov — joined Expedition 75 and completed hatch opening and welcome procedures hours after docking.
- The new crew will relieve Crew‑12 over the next few days and begin about six months of experiments in microgravity, including stem‑cell‑derived tissue work, plant‑growth trials and studies of blood‑flow changes in space.
- The mission underscores SpaceX’s central role in routine crew transport using reusable Falcon 9/Dragon hardware and sets a U.S. speed benchmark while remaining short of the absolute fastest Soyuz rendezvous recorded by Russia.