Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk set for ISS launch with NASA's SpaceX Crew 13

Joshua Kutryk has been waiting for this moment since childhood. The 44-year-old Canadian astronaut sits in quarantine in Houston, counting down to next Thursday, when he will board a SpaceX capsule at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and finally launch toward the International Space Station. It is a dream deferred by circumstance—a Boeing Starliner flight fell through in 2024, and this mission itself slipped by weeks while engineers fixed a spacecraft leak—but the goal remains unchanged. "I always dreamt of it and thought it would be the most wonderful experience," he said this week.

Kutryk is one of four crew members assigned to NASA's SpaceX Crew 13. Alongside him will be NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. Together they will spend six months in orbit, conducting experiments, performing research, and carrying out essential maintenance on the station. The work is demanding, but Kutryk has spent his career preparing for exactly this kind of operation. He flew CF-18 fighter jets for the Canadian Armed Forces from 2007 to 2011, deployed to Libya and Afghanistan, and later worked as a test pilot in Alberta. Those years taught him to operate complex, high-stakes machinery in environments where failure carries real consequences.

What Kutryk brings to orbit extends beyond his professional credentials. Packed in a cargo shipment already at the station is a pocket watch—a family heirloom carried from Ukraine to Canada four generations ago. It is a tangible link to his past, a small object that will travel farther than anyone in his family could have imagined. "I think it would have been completely impossible for them to have any inkling of an imagination of where that watch could be 100 years later," he reflected. "I think it's just this really important personal memento, but also a really neat metaphor for how much the world can change because of technology, because of how we explore."

The mission carries weight beyond the personal. Kutryk will operate the Canadarm, the robotic system designed and built in Canada, and hopes to conduct spacewalks. More broadly, the mission includes Canadian-led research into how microgravity and space travel affect human health—work that positions Canada as an active contributor to the station's scientific mission. Kutryk will be the fourth Canadian to undertake a long-duration stay on the ISS, and he is bringing Canadian flags with him.

But the deeper significance, in Kutryk's view, is what this mission says about the world right now. He emphasized that building trust among the crew is essential—the four will be confined together in a small space for months, their relationship tested deliberately through high-stress training exercises. That kind of international collaboration matters, he argued, especially at a moment of geopolitical tension. "One where countries are working together, not fighting. One where we're looking after the world, not ruining it," he said of the future space exploration can help demonstrate. "That's the path and space helps us to do that."

Kutryk knows what awaits him in orbit. Like every astronaut before him, his first act will be to find the largest window and look down at Earth. "There is nothing that compares for how you change when you view the Earth from not being on the Earth," he said. "When you view it as this little blue perishable place where all of humanity has ever existed." That perspective—the shift that comes from seeing home from a distance—is perhaps the real mission. Everything else, the experiments and the maintenance and the research, flows from that moment of recognition.