NASA's Crew-13 astronauts arrive in Florida ahead of Thursday launch to space station

NASA's next crew for the International Space Station arrived in Florida on Saturday to begin final preparations for a launch scheduled for Thursday, capping months of training for a mission that will keep the station staffed into next spring.

NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, who will serve as commander and pilot, landed at Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility around 1 p.m. EDT after flying in from Ellington Field in Houston aboard T-38 training jets. They were joined by Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, who will serve as mission specialists, according to NASA.

The four are scheduled to launch no earlier than 11:10 a.m. EDT on Thursday aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. If the mission launches on time, the crew is expected to dock at the station's Harmony module roughly nine hours later, around 8 p.m. that evening, according to NASA's mission page for the flight.

Crew-13 is the 13th operational flight of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, run jointly with SpaceX, and is expected to spend roughly six months aboard the orbiting laboratory as members of Expedition 75 and 76, relieving the four-member Crew-12 team that has been aboard the station since docking in February. The crew will spend its final days before launch in quarantine at the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy, completing medical checks, spacesuit fittings and equipment reviews.

The mission continues a steady cadence of crew rotations that has kept the space station continuously staffed for more than a quarter-century. NASA has flown crew rotation missions with SpaceX roughly twice a year since the Commercial Crew Program's first operational flight in 2020, alongside continued flights of Russia's Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA and Roscosmos crew members under a long-standing seat-swap agreement between the two space agencies.

Once aboard, the Crew-13 astronauts will take over station maintenance duties, conduct spacewalks and carry out a rotating slate of scientific research spanning biology, materials science and Earth observation. NASA says the work helps refine technology and medical protocols the agency will need for longer voyages to the moon under its Artemis program and, eventually, to Mars. The four join a station whose research schedule has grown increasingly international, with NASA continuing to coordinate crew handovers, cargo resupply and joint experiments alongside Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Watkins previously flew to the station in 2022 as part of Crew-4, spending nearly 170 days in orbit and becoming the first Black woman to complete a long-duration spaceflight. Delaney, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov will each be making their first trip to the space station, rounding out a crew that mixes a spaceflight veteran with three astronauts about to fly for the first time.

After a brief handover period, the outgoing Crew-12 astronauts -- NASA's Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA's Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos's Andrey Fedyaev, who have been aboard the station for about eight months -- are expected to undock and splash down off the coast of California, closing out their mission as Crew-13 settles into its new orbital home.