Crew-13 lifts off at 11:10 a.m. with a docking aimed at the fastest US arrival

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted NASA's Crew-13 off pad 40 at Cape Canaveral at 11:10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, with a docking at the International Space Station targeted for about 7 p.m., a flight NASA said would be the fastest launch-to-dock by a US spacecraft.

The four seats are NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The Dragon reached orbit, separated from the Falcon 9 second stage, and opened its nosecone, NASA said. The planned trip was about 7 hours and 50 minutes. Docking was aimed at the space-facing port of the Harmony module. Once aboard, NASA said, the station would hold 11 people, from NASA, the Canadian agency, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos.

At liftoff the station was moving at 17,500 miles an hour, about 263 miles up, northwest of Havana. It passed over Kennedy Space Center one minute and 37 seconds after launch. The Falcon 9's first stage was set to land at Landing Zone 40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. A post-launch briefing at Kennedy included NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, Lori Glaze of the human spaceflight directorate, Dana Weigel of the low Earth orbit programme at Johnson Space Center, Mathieu Caron of the Canadian agency, and Julianna Scheiman of SpaceX.

The speed is the operational claim. A same-day launch and dock is a tighter timeline than the day-long chases earlier Crew Dragons flew. It depends on the station being in the right part of its orbit when the rocket leaves the pad, which is why NASA published the Havana position and the one-minute-37-second pass over Kennedy. Those are the geometry of a short rendezvous, not colour. If the 7 p.m. dock held, the crew went from a Florida morning to a station evening in under eight hours.

Friday morning reports placed the four on the station. WORLD radio's Friday bulletin said the astronauts woke on the International Space Station after the Thursday launch. NASA's own pre-launch note had framed arrival as a plan, with the 7 p.m. time as the target for the fastest US docking. Between those two sentences is the flight itself. The public record on Friday morning was a launch that happened and a crew described as aboard.

The work waiting for them is the part of the mission that is not a launch photo. NASA said the increment includes growing human tissue from stem cells and tests of new ways to grow crops in orbit. Those are station experiments, not Dragon experiments. They need the crew on board and the samples in the racks. Watkins and Delaney are the NASA pair. Kutryk is the Canadian seat. Teteryatnikov is the Roscosmos seat on a US commercial vehicle, the arrangement the station has used since the Crew Dragon and Soyuz have been exchanging seats.

Eleven people on one station is a full house. The number only holds if the arriving Dragon docks before anyone leaves. NASA stated it as the count after arrival, not as the count at liftoff. A station at 11 is a logistics fact: more oxygen, more food, more experiment crew, and a traffic plan for the next departure. The Crew-13 flight is a rotation. Someone already up there is the crew this Dragon is there to replace, on the calendar NASA has set for the increment.

The launch site is Space Launch Complex 40, the Cape Canaveral pad SpaceX has used for crew when 39A is not the one in use. Landing Zone 40, next door, is where the booster was to come back. A crew mission that also recovers the first stage on the Cape is the standard SpaceX pattern. Thursday's addition is the clock: 11:10 a.m. off the pad, 7 p.m. at Harmony if the target held, under eight hours from Florida to the station.

What a reader can check later is whether 7 p.m. was the actual contact time. What is already on NASA's blog is the crew, the pad, the Havana geometry, and the claim that this profile would be the fastest US launch-to-dock in the station's history.