NASA Announces SpaceX Crew-14 Mission to International Space Station

Crew-14 Preflight Training at SpaceX. Arutyun Kiviryan (RSA), Chris Birch (NASA), Kayla Barron (NASA), and Makoto Suwa (JAXA). NASA/SpaceX

With just three years, at most, left to go in its lifespan, the International Space Station will once again welcome a new batch of astronauts in 2027.

On Sept. 24, NASA announced its SpaceX Crew-14 mission to the orbital outpost. NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Chris Birch will lead Makoto Suwa of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Arutyun Kiviryan of Roscosmos on a long-duration mission set to launch no earlier than Spring 2027.

While in orbit, “the crew will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the Moon and Mars and to benefit people on Earth,” NASA said.

Barron is Crew-14’s commander. A graduate of the Naval Academy and Cambridge before being selected as an astronaut in 2017, she will be making her second trip to the space station. She previously spent 177 days in orbit as part of the Crew-3 mission, taking two spacewalks during that time.

Birch is Crew-14’s pilot. She was selected to be an astronaut in 2021 after earning a doctorate in biological engineering from MIT, teaching at Caltech, and competing for the U.S. Olympic team in Tokyo as a track cyclist, among other accomplishments. On the ground, she served as CapCom for the Artemis II mission around the Moon, and the crew lead for the space station’s 72nd liveaboard “Expedition” mission. Crew-14 will be her first trip to space.

It will also be the first trip to space for Crew-14’s mission specialists. Suwa was selected by JAXA in 2023 and became a certified astronaut in 2024. He previously worked with the World Bank Group, the Japan Overseas Cooperation, and the United Nations World Meteorological Organization. He holds a doctorate in geosciences from Princeton.

Kiviryan was selected in 2021 for the Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center Cosmonaut Corps and became a test cosmonaut in 2023. He is a graduate of the Saint Petersburg Suvorov Military School and the Baltic State Technical University, gaining expertise in rocket science and the operation of computer-controlled machines.

This will be NASA’s 14th commercial crew flight with SpaceX, and once the Dragon crew capsule is docked with the station, the crew will join the end of the 75th and the start of the 76th liveaboard “Expedition” missions. Those missions begin and end with the changeover of crews flying aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA did not specify in its announcement exactly how long these four will stay aboard the space station, but it could last up to eight months. NASA’s ongoing SpaceX Crew-12 mission, for example, launched on Feb. 13 and is expected to return home sometime in October.

Crew-12 will be relieved by NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission, which is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Oct. 1.

The International Space Station is slated for decommissioning via controlled destructive reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere by 2030 after establishing and maintaining a permanent human presence in space for 25 years.

NASA has yet to announce an official set number of crewed missions for the remainder of the station’s lifetime. While shorter private missions are set to fly to and from the Space Station in the coming years, and current astronaut candidates are still training to live and work there, the SpaceX Crew-14 mission could be one of only a handful of long-duration missions left to fly in the remaining time.