SpaceX Lines Up Three Flights in a Single Day, Including Crew-13 and a First for Falcon Heavy

Thursday is shaping up to be one of the most crowded days in SpaceX history, with three separate missions staged on opposite coasts of the United States.

The headline act is Crew-13, which is due to lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral at 11:10 a.m. ET, carrying four astronauts toward the International Space Station. NASA’s Jessica Watkins commands the flight, joined by pilot Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. Watkins is the only veteran of the group, while Kutryk becomes the first Canadian to reach orbit under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Docking with the Harmony module is expected roughly nine hours after launch. A Friday window at 10:47 a.m. ET serves as the backup.

Later in the day, attention shifts west, where a Falcon 9 is booked to fly from Vandenberg Space Force Base during a launch window running from 2:18 to 3:16 p.m. ET on a Transporter rideshare flight. The day then closes on the East Coast with Falcon Heavy lifting off from Launch Complex 39A at 11:53 p.m. ET carrying NROL-97, the first National Reconnaissance Office payload ever entrusted to the triple-core rocket. Its two side boosters, veterans of earlier government and science missions, are slated to return to Landing Zones 1 and 2, while the center core will be expended over the Atlantic.

Should the Florida landings go as planned, the Space Coast would see boosters touch down at LZ-40, LZ-1 and LZ-2 within the same day for the first time, with residents in Brevard, Orange and Volusia counties told to expect more than one sonic boom. The packed manifest comes only days after Starship reached orbit for the first time, and it arrives as NASA extends Dragon’s role as the agency’s sole operational crew vehicle, having added further missions to SpaceX’s contract in a modification worth $946 million.