Jessica Watkins is the commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station.
She flies with pilot Luke Delaney and two mission specialists, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos. It is a first spaceflight for all three of them. Watkins is the only person on that vehicle who has done any of this before, and the other three are her responsibility.
She will also be the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a SpaceX Dragon twice. The first time was Crew-4 in 2022, which put her in orbit for 170 days across Expeditions 67 and 68.
The record underneath the command is a scientist’s. She took a degree in geological and environmental sciences at Stanford and a doctorate in geology at UCLA. She worked on the Curiosity rover science team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reading the surface of Mars from an office in California. She did postdoctoral research at Caltech. NASA selected her as an astronaut in 2017. She grew up in Lafayette, Colorado.
Read the sequence in order, because the order is the point. She studied a planet she had never stood on. Then she went to space and stayed for most of a year. Then she came back, and now she is the one giving the orders.
Commander is not a courtesy title. It is the seat that answers for the vehicle, the flight plan and the people inside it, and it is not handed to anyone on a first flight. Three of the four people on Crew-13 are on their first flight. She is not.
There is a version of this story that treats her as a passenger with a good résumé. That version is wrong. She is the one in charge, and the thing she is in charge of is four lives and a spacecraft.
