Crew-13's Dragon targets a U.S. record with a 7-hour-50-minute trip to the space station

The two clock times in NASA's release agree with each other. Liftoff at 11:10 a.m. EDT ^[3] and a docking at about 7 p.m. ^[4] are 7 hours 50 minutes apart ^[11], the same flight time NASA gives for Dragon ^[5]. Only the launch had happened when the release went out. The docking is written in the future tense ^[4].

NASA calls the planned docking "the fastest launch-to-docking by a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station" ^[2]. The qualifier limits the comparison to American vehicles. NASA did not disclose the previous U.S. mark. Without it, the size of the improvement cannot be worked out from the release.

The approach is automated. SpaceX will monitor a series of automatic spacecraft maneuvers from its mission control center in Hawthorne, California, while NASA watches station operations from Johnson Space Center in Houston ^[13]. The target is the forward port of the Harmony module ^[4].

The record counts only to docking. After docking, the crew change out of their spacesuits and prepare cargo for offload before opening the hatch at around 8:45 p.m. ^[14]. That puts hatch opening 1 hour 45 minutes after docking ^[18] and 9 hours 35 minutes after launch ^[17].

The four join the Expedition 75 crew, which includes NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina ^[6]. After a brief handover, Crew-12 returns to Earth with NASA's Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA's Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev ^[7]. That leaves seven people named in the release aboard ^[12]. Lori Glaze, associate administrator of NASA's Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said "Our steady cadence of commercial crew launches demonstrates the essential role the International Space Station plays in sustaining our presence in Earth's orbit and sharpening the tools we'll take forward to the Moon and Mars." ^[16] The evidence in the release for that cadence is the swap itself: one Dragon crew arrives and, after the handover, the other leaves ^[7].

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the four "will carry forward important work aboard the International Space Station" ^[15]. The release lists that work, all of it as plans. The crew will use microgravity to produce human stem cell-derived tissues for disease modeling and drug testing for conditions such as heart disease and Parkinson's ^[8]. Crop work centres on a new, mostly autonomous plant growth system, plus tests of how plants grow outside dedicated facilities ^[9]. Human-health studies continue on factors linked to blood-flow abnormalities in microgravity, alongside a test of a new inflight diagnostic device ^[10].