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NASA announced this Thursday the four astronauts who will be part of the SpaceX Crew-13 mission crew, scheduled to launch no earlier than mid-September 2026 towards the International Space Station (ISS).
The announcement was made through an official statement on the agency's website and shared via its account on the social network X, where NASA described the mission as an opportunity to "learn to live in space while improving life on Earth."
The crew consists of four members from three different space agencies: the NASA of the United States, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Among the members is at least one female NASA astronaut, a second astronaut from the same agency, a representative from the CSA who appears in official images wearing a full white spacesuit with the Canadian flag, and a cosmonaut from Roscosmos identified by the insignia of his agency and the Russian flag.
According to the official statement from NASA, "four crew members from three space agencies will launch no earlier than mid-September towards the International Space Station" as part of this mission.
Crew-13 will be the thirteenth operational crew rotation under NASA's Commercial Crew Program with SpaceX, using the Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission will relieve the current crew of Crew-12, which was launched on February 13, 2026, from Cape Canaveral and docked with the ISS the following day, featuring commander Jessica Meir and pilot Jack Hathaway, both from NASA, alongside Sophie Adenot from the European Space Agency and Andrey Fedyaev from Roscosmos.
Crew-12 was designed as a mission lasting approximately eight months, which places its return in the fall of 2026, precisely when Crew-13 would take over to continue the uninterrupted human presence on the station.
The participation of Roscosmos in Crew-13 is significant in the context of the geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia since 2022, although both agencies have maintained cooperation on the ISS as a space for scientific collaboration, independent of diplomatic conflicts.
The mission takes place in a year of intense space activity for NASA: in April 2026, the agency completed the historic Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The ISS is set to be decommissioned around 2030, which means that current missions are part of the final years of the station's operation, giving special significance to each crew rotation.
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