Crew-13 Docked at the Station in 7 Hours and 55 Minutes

So basically: Crew-13 is on the station. NASA says Dragon docked at 7:05 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1, 7 hours and 55 minutes after liftoff. That is the fastest launch-to-docking a U.S. spacecraft has made to the International Space Station.

The clock

Liftoff was 11:10 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. On board were NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.

At launch, NASA described the trip as about 7 hours and 50 minutes, with docking aimed at the forward, space-facing port of the Harmony module around 7 p.m. The docking post later put the actual contact at 7:05 p.m. EDT and the elapsed time at 7 hours and 55 minutes.

The hatch opened at 9:19 p.m. EDT. The four then entered and joined Expedition 75.

Who was already there

NASA’s hatch post names the crew already aboard: NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Anil Menon, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov, Anna Kikina, and Andrey Fedyaev.

A station diagram posted with that update shows six ships attached on Oct. 1: the Crew-12 Dragon, the Crew-13 Dragon, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL, Soyuz MS-29, and Progress 95 and 96.

What is not dated yet

NASA has said Crew-12 leaves after Crew-13 arrives and a short handover, and that teams will check weather at splashdown sites off California before departure. The Oct. 1 posts do not give a splashdown day.

My take

The pre-launch story was a readiness poll. This one is the arrival. A same-day docking is the part that makes a crew rotation feel routine, and NASA is calling the time a U.S. record. The unfinished piece is the ride home for the crew that was already there. Until NASA posts a date, that return is a plan, not a clock.