SpaceX sets US speed record with first Black female commander leading crew to ISS

Jessica Watkins radioed her thanks as the Dragon capsule climbed away from Cape Canaveral on Thursday morning, eight hours away from the International Space Station and a place in the history books. She had just become the first Black woman to command a crew to orbit, leading three fellow astronauts on what would become the fastest crewed journey to the station ever flown by an American spacecraft or agency.

The launch itself had been touch-and-go. SpaceX and NASA had delayed the flight for three weeks to repair a fuel system leak in the Dragon capsule, and on launch day, thick clouds hung over the Florida coast through the morning hours. But the weather relented enough to allow a safe liftoff in late morning, and Watkins—a geologist who spent a decade working with NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars and had visited the station once before in 2022—led her crew skyward.

Watkins was not alone in making history. Two of her three crewmates were stepping into space for the first time: Luke Delaney, a retired Marine, and Joshua Kutryk, a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force. The fourth member, Sergey Teteryatnikov, a former submariner from Russia, was also new to orbit. Together they would spend the next six months at the station, replacing four astronauts who had been living there since February.

The eight-hour transit was remarkable not for drama but for efficiency. The station's orbital position at the moment of launch happened to align perfectly with the Dragon's trajectory, allowing SpaceX to skip the traditional multi-day approach and dock in a single shift. It was a record not just for Elon Musk's company but for any American space program, including NASA itself.

The crew had traveled to the launch pad in black Teslas bearing license plates reading "Lucky 13," a nod to their mission designation, Crew-13, which itself honored Apollo 13, the 1970 lunar mission that nearly ended in disaster but brought its astronauts safely home. They carried with them a small crocheted golden dragon wearing a four-leaf clover around its neck, another talisman against the odds. "We figured it wouldn't hurt to bring a little of our own luck just in case, but clearly we don't need it," Watkins said once in orbit, calling her crew "four of the luckiest humans on or off planet Earth."

But luck would soon take on a different meaning for one of them. Joshua Kutryk's wife, Heather, was due to give birth to their third child in late November—while her husband orbited 250 miles above Earth. He would become the fourth man to experience fatherhood from space, joining a small and unusual club. NASA and the Canadian Space Agency both pledged to keep him connected to his family during the birth. The space agency had done this before: in 2004, astronaut Mike Fincke spoke to his wife's delivery room via radio as their daughter was born. Five years later, Randy Bresnik, who will command next year's Artemis III mission to the Moon, called his wife's hospital from orbit. The experience was slower for Austrian astronaut Franz Viehböck, who launched to the Soviet Mir space station in 1991 only to learn the next day that his daughter had been born hours after his liftoff.

The successful launch was one of several major moments for SpaceX that week. Three hours after Crew-13 reached orbit, the company launched a Falcon rocket from California carrying more than 100 small satellites. Another Falcon was scheduled to lift off late Thursday night from Florida with a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. All of this came in the same week that SpaceX's Starship, the company's fully reusable super-heavy launch system, reached orbit for the first time. For a company that has become central to American spaceflight, it was a week of accumulating achievements.