A leak discovered on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is delaying the launch of a crew of four bound for the International Space Station.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission is slated to carry four people to the station from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station: two NASA astronauts, one from Canada and a Russian cosmonaut.
During processing of the capsule for their trip, SpaceX uncovered a leak of oxidizer in the spacecraft’s propulsion system. Teams from NASA and SpaceX are now investigating the cause and any potential fixes.
Crew-13 was set to launch mid-September. Now, their mission is pushed back until at least the end of the month.
The mission’s commander is NASA’s Jessica Watkins, who will be making her second trip to space. Pil
They are joined by mission specialists Joshua Kutryk from the Canadian Space Agency and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.
Historically, NASA missions with the number 13 haven’t gone so well. Apollo 13 encountered an issue during its flight to the moon that crippled the spacecraft and nearly ended with a loss of the three astronauts. Thanks to creative engineering and planning from mission control, the crew returned home safely, but had to abort plans to land on the lunar surface.
Delaney said that history is built into the design of the crew’s mission patch, but he said they don’t think they are inheriting Apollo 13’s fate just because of the unlucky number.
“The numeral significance has not lost on us,” said Delaney at a press conference last month – before teams discovered the leak. “We're leveraging that heritage a bit, and we'll see if anything manifests that shows anything of good luck for us in the future.”
SpaceX has been launching astronauts to the space station since May 2020 in its Dragon capsule. The vehicle assigned to the Crew-13 mission has been there once before, carrying a privately-chartered mission in June 2025 for commercial company Axiom Space. That crew named the spacecraft Grace.
Once Crew-13 does launch, the capsule and crew will spend about half a year at the station and then return home, splashing down off the coast of California. ot Luke Delaney is also a NASA astronaut and Florida native. He graduated from Deltona High School in 1997 and considers DeBary his home.
