A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft stood vertical at Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on September 27, 2026, ahead of the Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. The crew—NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, CSA astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov—is scheduled to launch October 1 for a long-duration science mission. The multinational crew composition is the quiet story here. Nearly five years after the invasion of Ukraine, a Russian cosmonaut still rides a SpaceX vehicle under a cross-flight agreement that predates the war. Operational spaceflight remains one of the last arenas where U.S.–Russia cooperation functions at all. The ISS itself is an artifact of 1990s diplomacy that has outlived the geopolitical conditions that created it. For SpaceX, Crew-13 is another production run on mature hardware. Falcon 9 has become the most-flown orbital rocket in history, and Dragon crew rotations are now routine enough that the launch itself is logistically unremarkable. That reliability is the point—NASA's commercial crew program was designed to make ISS access boring, and it has succeeded. The science payload aboard the ISS continues to justify the station's operational cost, though the station is approaching end-of-life territory. NASA's current plan retires the ISS around 2030, with commercial successors still years from operational readiness. Every crew rotation from here on is a race against structural aging. Jessica Watkins returns to the ISS after her Crew-4 mission in 2022, making her one of a small cohort of astronauts with repeat Dragon flights. Joshua Kutryk makes his first spaceflight, representing Canada's continued investment in human spaceflight through its ISS partnership agreements. The image, credited to SpaceX, shows the integrated stack in pre-launch configuration—a visual that has become as standardized as the mission profile itself. What matters now is not the launch vehicle but what happens during the months of orbital research that follow.
