Eight hours from launchpad to space station — a new American record

SpaceX's Crew-13 mission lifted off and docked with the International Space Station just 7 hours and 55 minutes later — the fastest crewed delivery any American spacecraft has ever managed, smashing the previous mark of about 12 and a half hours. The secret was celestial luck: the station happened to be in exactly the right spot, so the Dragon capsule could start chasing it almost immediately. ‘We got lucky this time,’ said Julianna Scheiman, NASA's director of science for the Dragon program. ‘The orbital mechanics, the physics of it all, worked out for it to be the shortest launch-to-docking time we've had to date.’