A SpaceX Crew Dragon carrying four astronauts has set a new speed record, travelling from launch to docking at the International Space Station in just 7 hours and 55 minutes — the fastest such journey by any American spacecraft.

The Crew-13 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on October 1 and docked with the forward port of the station’s Harmony module the same day. NASA confirmed the record: the previous best was 12 hours and 33 minutes, set by an uncrewed Dragon cargo craft in 2024, while the fastest crewed US flight had been 14 hours and 43 minutes by Crew-11 in August 2025.

Orbital luck, not a faster rocket

The record was not the result of a radically upgraded spacecraft. According to SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programmes, the team got lucky this time — the space station happened to be in an unusually favourable orbital position, allowing the Dragon capsule Grace to start closing the distance almost immediately after reaching orbit.

The launch had been delayed by three weeks to fix a leaking fuel system on the Dragon, and thick clouds nearly scrubbed the attempt on the day. In the end, the skies cleared enough for a safe liftoff, and commander Jessica Watkins radioed down her thanks for an amazing ride.

The crew on board

Watkins has become the first Black woman to command a crew to orbit. A geologist who worked with NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover a decade ago, she is making her second trip to the station following a lengthy stay in 2022, and she is the first person to have published a scientific paper from space.

Her three crewmates are all first-time space flyers: NASA astronaut Luke Delaney, a retired Marine; Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force; and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, a former submariner. The quartet will spend six months aboard the orbiting laboratory, replacing four astronauts who have been living there since February.