NASA eyes September launch date for SpaceX Crew-13 mission to ISS. Cybertrucks will be on the launch pad 9%
By Michael Adkison25%
8/3/2026, 3:16:17 PM
Topics: Nasa, Space Exploration, Commercial Crew Program, International Space Station, Spacex, Tesla Cybertruck
Keywords: Business, Houston, Local, Nasa, Space, Astronauts, Cybertruck, Johnson Space Center, Spacex, Spacex Dragon
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Availability Heuristic, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 10.2% saturation with 98 hits. Analysis detected 740 faulty-reasoning hits from 965 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 19.2% and a BS Rank of 9% (26,350 of 28,846 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 91.30% of the article peer group.
Four astronauts are expected to launch for the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a SpaceX spacecraft as soon as Sept. 12, according to NASA, which revealed Monday that Cybertrucks made by another Elon Musk company will be on the launch pad.
The SpaceX Crew-13 mission will include commander Jessica Watkins of NASA, pilot Luke Delaney of NASA and mission specialists Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, partnering with private space exploration companies like SpaceX.
"During the mission, the crew will help us fight heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem cell-derived tissues that will help improve medicine, disease modeling and pharmaceutical testing," Dana Weigel, manager of NASA's low Earth orbit program, said during a Monday news conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
"They will also explore crop production — that's important for longer-duration spaceflight missions — and they'll help us better understand blood flow abnormalities that we see in space, along with testing new diagnostic medical equipment for monitoring crew health."
On Friday, the crew is expected to conduct a test drive of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which will take the four crew members to the ISS.
During that test drive, the astronauts will test their suits, leak checks, and communications checks, among other things.
The mission had been originally slated to launch in November.
Earlier this year, NASA moved up the mission's launch to September in order to increase the cadence of launches, a posture NASA's administrator Jared Isaacman has adopted across the agency, including with the Artemis program.
At the same time, the mission comes as NASA is preparing to decommission and deorbit the ISS, beginning as soon as 2030.
"It has always been our goal to enable as many missions as we can to station," Weigel said.
"Our original plan had missions rotating on a six-month basis.
We made a shift in the agency's plan when we were facing a substantial budget reduction.
And because we have to order flights three years in advance — you know, you can't just quickly make a change, you kind of have to do advance planning for that — we made a shift to this eight-to-nine month mission space, and then congressionally we ended up healthier.
And so what you're seeing is we're going back to our original plan."
Crew-13 astronauts
Watkins, who grew up in Colorado, is poised to be the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft twice, after she was part of the 2022 SpaceX Crew-4 mission.
During that mission, she spent 170 days in space, spending more time in space than any other Black woman.
On this mission, Watkins is the only crew member who's been to space before.
Delaney, a Florida native, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov will make their spaceflight debuts as the 296th, 297th and 298th astronauts to visit the ISS.
Kutryk is also expected to join an exclusive group of astronauts in history at about the halfway mark of the mission.
His wife is expected to give birth to their third child in November, while Kutryk is in space, something that has happened only a few times in NASA's history.
"I love challenge, and there certainly is challenge associated with this one," Kutryk said Monday.
"I think that my family is ready."
Kutryk is also a fourth-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, something which was noted Monday as he will be sharing the spacecraft with Teteryatnikov, a Russian astronaut.
A reporter asked if the two have had political differences, given the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.
"There is no issue," Kutryk said.
"Human to human, there is actually very seldom an issue.
So from my perspective, working astronaut-to-astronaut, engineer-to-engineer, technician-to-technician, there is no issue, especially in the space community.
They're wonderfully talented people, and everyone is working toward the same end."
Cybertrucks on the launch pad
Crew-13 is another iteration of the ongoing commercial partnership with Elon Musk-owned SpaceX and NASA, though there are some differences from mission to mission.
Among them this time is one that highlights another Musk-owned company: Tesla.
Historically, NASA has kept mine-resistant, ambush-protected, or MRAP, vehicles on the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in case of an emergency which requires evacuating the astronauts.
With SpaceX Crew-13, however, they are scrapping MRAPS and replacing them with Tesla Cybertrucks.
"The advantage, clearly, is the speed," said Richard Jones, deputy director of the commercial crew office.
"The speed at which a Cybertruck can exit the blast-danger area is definitely one of the reasons why SpaceX has chosen to go in that direction.
But I think really the main thing that I want to iterate is that it decouples a conflict in terms of trying to compete for some of the resources for an MRAP."
In February, when Crew-12 launched, there was a slim possibility that it would launch on the same day as Artemis II, NASA's historic lunar mission.
That meant, Jones said, the two missions were effectively competing for the same resources.
By allowing SpaceX to also utilize private Tesla vehicles, it frees up government resources as needed.
Jones also indicated there has been an "ongoing discussion" about whether or not to privatize the use of military personnel to be on standby in case of a launch pad emergency.
The Cybertrucks were not modified for the mission, Jones added, but they were certified to be ready for the possibility of being used.
For example, NASA ensured the astronauts would be able to get in the vehicle with their space suits on.
"It also looks really cool," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science programs at SpaceX, said during Monday's press conference.
Speakers
3speakers46%attributed speech524writer words
Selected voice
86%flagged-word coverageDana Weigel
197 attributed words45% of attributed speech43% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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