UTC) Thursday. Nine minutes later, they were in orbit to begin closing in on the space station for docking Thursday evening.

The launch was delayed from mid-September to replace a balky valve in the Dragon spacecraft's propulsion system, a task that involved cutting into a propellant line inside the ship to swap out a faulty component.

28:T433,{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://nvdium.com/en/articles/808968076#article","url":"https://nvdium.com/en/articles/808968076","headline":"SpaceX describes surgical intervention before launch of latest crew mission","description":"With Crew-13, Jessica Watkins became the first Black woman to lead a mission into space.","datePublished":"2026-10-01T23:26:43.662Z","dateModified":"2026-10-05T00:12:14.478Z","mainEntityOfPage":"https://nvdium.com/en/articles/808968076","isAccessibleForFree":true,"inLanguage":"en","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://nvdium.com/#website"},"speakable":{"@type":"SpeakableSpecification","cssSelector":[".article-header h1","[data-testid='article-summary']"]},"articleSection":"Technology","keywords":"","image":["https://nvdium.com/nvdium-logo.png"],"author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Stephen Clark"}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Nvdium","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://nvdium.com/nvdium-logo.png","width":960,"height":960}},"copyrightHolder":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Ars Technica"}}