Joshua Kutryk is set to fly Crew-13 from Kennedy as Canada sends a second astronaut up in a year

Colonel Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency was scheduled to leave Kennedy Space Center at 11:10 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, 1 October 2026, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon on NASA's Crew-13 rotation to the International Space Station. The Canadian Space Agency set that time as the opening of the launch window, not as a guarantee. Weather at the Cape was the variable still open on Thursday morning. Docking with the station was timed for 7 p.m. Eastern if the rocket left on the hour.

Kutryk, 44, is the mission specialist. The other three seats are NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, NASA astronaut Luke Delaney, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The crew was due to walk out of quarantine at about 7:40 a.m. Eastern, take the elevator to the capsule on pad 39A, and run the standard pre-launch checks. Melanie Joly, Canada's industry minister, travelled to the Kennedy Space Center for the attempt. A pre-launch briefing on Wednesday evening included Mathieu Caron, director of the Canadian astronaut office. A post-launch briefing was set for 12:45 p.m. Eastern.

The flight sits six months after Jeremy Hansen launched on Artemis II, the crewed lunar flyby. Two Canadian seats in half a year is a new pace for a programme that has usually measured its crewed flights in decades. Hansen's seat was on a NASA lunar vehicle. Kutryk's is on a commercial crew taxi to a station that has had a Canadian on board, in person or by robot, for most of its life. The Canadarm tradition is the institutional reason Ottawa is on this manifest. The personal reason is a selection that put Kutryk in the 2017 astronaut class and then waited out the queue.

He is a colonel, a test pilot by training, and a mission specialist on a six-month increment. CBC reported that his wife, Heather, is due to give birth to their third child while he is in orbit. That fact does not change the flight plan. It does change what a six-month expedition means for the family watching from the Marc Garneau Conference Centre in Longueuil, where the agency opened the floor to media from 10:30 a.m. Eastern.

Crew-13 is the thirteenth operational rotation under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The vehicle is a Crew Dragon. The rocket is a Falcon 9. The destination is the US segment of the station, with Teteryatnikov's seat the standing Roscosmos place on a NASA-contracted flight. That seat has survived the break in almost every other US-Russian channel since 2022. Station crew rotations are one of the few places the two agencies still trade training cycles and launch seats. Thursday's manifest is that bargain in four names.

What Kutryk will do on board is the ordinary station load: maintenance, science racks, and the Canadian experiments the agency manifests when it has a crew member up. The agency has not published a separate national mission name for the increment. The public marker is the launch itself, and the fact that a second Canadian left Earth in 2026, this time for half a year rather than a lunar pass.

If the weather holds the countdown, the next public times are the ones the agency already printed: launch at 11:10 a.m. Eastern, a briefing 95 minutes later, docking at 7 p.m. A scrub moves all three. The crew, the minister and the family in Longueuil were in place for the first window.