SpaceX Claims Every Spot on NASA's Fastest ISS Trip List

SpaceX has tightened its grip on a very specific piece of spaceflight history: the five quickest journeys a U.S. vehicle has ever made to the International Space Station all belong to Dragon capsules. The newest entry, Crew Dragon Grace, cut the previous benchmark by more than four hours.

Grace linked up with the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. ET on October 1, only 7 hours and 55 minutes after leaving Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. NASA called it the fastest launch-to-docking by a U.S. spacecraft in the outpost’s history. Before this flight, the record for a crewed Dragon belonged to Crew-11, which needed 14 hours and 43 minutes in August 2025. The uncrewed CRS-31 cargo run had set the overall U.S. mark at a little over 12 hours in November 2024. Rounding out the top five are Axiom’s Ax-2 at 15 hours and 35 minutes and NASA’s Crew-4 at 15 hours and 44 minutes, so every name on the list flew aboard a Dragon.

The crew onboard included NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. NASA had expected docking near 8 p.m. ET, but the capsule pulled in roughly an hour ahead of schedule. According to SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman, the advantage came less from new hardware than from orbital geometry, since the station happened to be sitting in a favorable position that let Dragon begin closing the distance shortly after reaching orbit. She described the transit as close to the theoretical minimum, and noted that most Dragon flights still require nearly a full day of thruster burns to raise and phase their orbits.

Attention at the station now shifts to a departure. NASA is aiming for 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 7, to undock Crew-12, with a splashdown off California targeted for about 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. Freeing that port opens the door for CRS-35, a cargo Dragon hauling the last batch of iROSA solar arrays.

Dragon remains the only operational American crew transport to the station while Boeing’s Starliner stays grounded. NASA recently extended SpaceX’s role further, adding Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to its contract through a $946 million modification.