SpaceX Crew-12 launches to the ISS

At 5:15 a.m. on 13 February 2026, a Falcon 9 cut through the Florida dark from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. Inside the Crew Dragon Freedom, a capsule making its fifth trip to orbit, sat an unusually storied crew: commander Jessica Meir, half of history's first all-female spacewalk in 2019; rookie NASA pilot Jack Hathaway; ESA's Sophie Adenot, flying a mission she had named Epsilon; and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who had joined the crew barely ten weeks earlier after the abrupt removal of veteran Oleg Artemyev.

The station they were chasing needed them. Since Crew-11's departure in January, the International Space Station had been running with a skeleton crew of three: NASA's Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. Weather had already pushed the launch back from 11 February, and every day mattered for a laboratory designed around seven pairs of hands. Minutes after liftoff, the booster added a small first of its own, making the inaugural touchdown at SpaceX's brand-new Landing Zone 40.

Freedom docked to the zenith port of the Harmony module at 20:15 UTC on 14 February, a Valentine's Day arrival that restored the station to its full seven-person complement. The newcomers folded into Expedition 74 and a research queue that included pneumonia-causing bacteria studied for cardiovascular therapies, technology for generating intravenous fluids in space, blood-flow investigations, and plant health monitoring. For Meir, it was a return to orbit more than six years after her first mission.

The flight carried a quiet historical rhyme. In October 2019, Meir and Christina Koch had floated out of the station together on the first all-woman spacewalk. In April 2026 the two were in space at the same time once again, Meir circling Earth aboard the ISS while Koch swept around the far side of the Moon on Artemis II. Adenot, meanwhile, became the first career astronaut of ESA's 2022 selection to reach orbit, a generational handoff in European spaceflight.