Crew-13 reached the ISS in 7 hours 50 minutes, a US record

Fifteen to 24 hours is the usual Crew Dragon trip to the International Space Station. Crew-13 took about 7 hours 50 minutes. The capsule launched at 11:10am EDT on 1 October from Cape Canaveral and docked around 7pm EDT, the fastest American spacecraft trip to the station so far.

Who is aboard

Commander Jessica Watkins of NASA is on her second Crew Dragon flight. Pilot Luke Delaney of NASA, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos are all rookies. They will stay on the station for about six months. The launch itself ran more than two weeks behind schedule.

Why it was so fast

Speed was not the goal of a bigger engine or a new trajectory. It came down to geometry. SpaceX's Julianna Scheiman put it this way: the station was in an opportune spot in space, and the orbital mechanics worked out to the shortest launch-to-docking time the company has had.

In plain terms, a spacecraft can only catch the station by launching into its orbital plane at the right moment, then closing the gap over several orbits. When the station already sits close to the right position ahead of the rocket, fewer orbits are needed. Russian Soyuz capsules have ranged from 3 hours to 2 days for the same reason.

What to watch

Booster B1101 landed for the third time about 7 minutes 40 seconds after liftoff, so the rocket side of the day was routine. That was also one of four booster landings SpaceX managed on 1 October, alongside the Falcon Heavy launch of NROL-97.

The thing to watch is whether short rendezvous becomes a planned option or stays a lucky alignment. For now it depends on where the station happens to be, and the launch slipped by more than two weeks before this window opened.