SpaceX's next astronaut launch for NASA now set for Oct. 1 after delay

three male and one female astronauts in white flight suits stand in a big, white-walled room — The Crew-13 members pose for a portrait in their pressure suits during a preflight training session at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. From left: Roscosmos' Sergey Teteryatnikov, NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk. (Image credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX's next astronaut mission for NASA has a new launch date at last.

The four-person Crew-13 flight to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to launch on Oct. 1, the agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 22).

Things had been up in the air since Aug. 29, when NASA announced that an oxidizer leak had been detected in the propulsion system of Crew-13's Dragon spacecraft. That leak took the original launch date of Sept. 12 off the table, and we didn't get another firm target until Tuesday.

If all goes according to the new plan, Crew-13 will launch at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) on Oct. 1 from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, riding a Falcon 9 rocket to low Earth orbit. It will arrive at the ISS roughly nine hours later, around 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT on Oct. 2).

You'll be able to watch all of this spaceflight action here at Space.com when the time comes.

Crew-13 will deliver four astronauts to the orbiting lab — NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, the Canadian Space Agency's Josh Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos. The quartet will live and work on the ISS for about seven months, performing a variety of scientific experiments and station maintenance work.

Crew-13 will relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission, who have been living on the ISS since mid-February.

The two crews will overlap for a few days. Then Crew-12 — which consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, will come home.

Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.