Watch SpaceX launch Crew-12 astronaut mission to the International Space Station early on Feb. 13

Watch live! NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 astronauts launch to the International Space Station - YouTube

SpaceX will launch the latest batch of astronauts to the International Space Station early Friday morning (Feb. 13), and you can watch the action live.

a tall rocket stands on a launch pad with the setting sun in the background — The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft that will fly the Crew-12 astronaut mission to the International Space Station for NASA stand on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at sunset on Feb. 10, 2026. (Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

If all goes according to plan, Crew-12's Crew Dragon capsule, named "Freedom," will dock with the ISS on Saturday (Feb. 14) at about 3:15 p.m. EST (2015 GMT). You can watch that milestone here at Space.com as well when the time comes.

Crew-12 consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir (mission commander) and Jack Hathaway (pilot), Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency (mission specialist), and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev (mission specialist).

Adenot and Hathaway are both spaceflight rookies. Crew-12 will be the second spaceflight for both Meir and Fedyaev. The four astronauts will stay aboard the ISS for about nine months — about three months longer than the normal crew rotation.

Crew-12 will bring the ISS back up to its normal complement of seven crewmembers. The orbiting lab has been staffed with a skeleton crew of three — NASA's Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev — since mid-January, when SpaceX's Crew-11 mission came back to Earth.

That departure came about a month early, due to an undisclosed medical issue with one of the Crew-11 astronauts. It was the first medical evacuation in the long history of the ISS.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, 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.

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