In November 2023, the Canadian Space Agency’s Joshua Kutryk was assigned to Boeing’s Starliner-1 mission, the flight that was supposed to mark Starliner’s transition from test vehicle to a working part of NASA’s astronaut rotation. That mission never carried a crew. Starliner ran into thruster problems serious enough that NASA brought its 2024 Crew Flight Test capsule home without the astronauts who flew it up, and in November 2025 NASA and Boeing converted Starliner-1 itself from a four person crewed flight into a cargo only mission, so the propulsion system could be tested further before Boeing tries flying people again.
Kutryk is going to space anyway.
In April 2026, NASA announced he had been reassigned to SpaceX’s Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station, targeting launch no earlier than mid September 2026 from Cape Canaveral. It will be his first spaceflight, close to three years after he was first assigned to fly.
What actually happened to Starliner-1
Kutryk’s original assignment was not an unusual one at the time. Boeing’s Starliner had been developed under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program alongside SpaceX’s Dragon, and Starliner-1 was meant to be its first operational crew rotation flight, following the uncrewed test flights and the 2024 Crew Flight Test. That test flight ran into trouble once docked at the station, with multiple issues traced mainly to the spacecraft’s thrusters, and NASA ultimately decided the safer course was to return the capsule uncrewed and bring its astronauts home on a Dragon instead.
Starliner-1 was still, at that point, notionally on the schedule as a crewed mission. That changed in November 2025, when NASA and Boeing agreed to fly Starliner-1 as cargo only, giving Boeing more room to work through the propulsion issues before committing astronauts to the capsule again. The four person crew that had been training for that flight, Kutryk included, needed somewhere else to go. Of the three NASA astronauts on that crew, Mike Fincke moved to SpaceX’s Crew-11 in March 2025, and Scott Tingle left flight rotation altogether to become NASA’s Chief of the Astronaut Office.
The third, Luke Delaney, ended up on the same mission Kutryk did: Crew-13, five months later.
How he has talked about the switch
Kutryk, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel with more than 4,000 flight hours across roughly 40 aircraft types, has described the change in practical terms rather than as a setback. “I am honoured to be a part of Crew-13 and represent Canada on this mission,” he said of the reassignment, adding that he was “committed to making the most of this unique opportunity.” In a later interview, he was more specific about why: Canada’s ISS partnership schedule had little slack left to give, and staying with Starliner any longer risked pushing Canada further behind on its own commitments.
He is not the only member of Crew-13 with an unusual route to this particular launch. Commanding the mission is NASA’s Jessica Watkins, a geologist who spent part of her career on the Curiosity rover science team studying landslide mechanics on Mars before joining the astronaut corps in 2017. She flew once already, as a mission specialist on Crew-4 in 2022, becoming the first Black woman to serve on a long duration ISS crew during that flight. On Crew-13 she moves into the commander’s seat and becomes, according to NASA’s own materials, the first NASA astronaut to fly a Crew Dragon spacecraft twice. A scientist who studies Martian slopes will spend her second spaceflight in command of a mission that has nothing to do with Mars at all, which is a fairly ordinary mismatch in an astronaut corps where flight assignments rarely track anyone’s research background.
The rest of the crew
Rounding out Crew-13 is Luke Delaney, a Florida native and former naval aviator who, like Kutryk, was reassigned off Starliner-1 and is flying for the first time, and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos, whose route into spaceflight runs through naval engineering rather than aviation. Teteryatnikov graduated from the Naval Academy in St Petersburg as an engineer specialising in ship power plants, worked on undersea vessels, and only entered cosmonaut training at Russia’s Gagarin centre in 2021. His seat on an American spacecraft exists because of a standing NASA-Roscosmos arrangement that trades seats between Crew Dragon and Soyuz without a cash payment changing hands, intended so that astronauts and cosmonauts from both countries can still reach the station if either vehicle is grounded. That arrangement was extended in 2025 to cover missions through 2026, with a further extension into 2027 reported but not yet confirmed by either agency, which is what allows Teteryatnikov’s seat on this particular flight to exist at all.
Put the four of them together and Crew-13 is less a single training pipeline than three separate careers that converged on the same capsule, two of them by way of the same detour: a Mars geologist on her second flight, a naval aviator and a fighter pilot who each trained for Starliner-1 before landing here instead, and a marine engineer who left submarines for orbit.
Why Starliner’s setback became someone else’s opportunity
Kutryk’s situation is a reasonably clean illustration of what happens structurally when a major spacecraft programme slips. NASA has generally tried to keep two independent, human rated vehicles capable of reaching the station, Dragon and Starliner, specifically so that a problem with one does not strand the rotation schedule. When Starliner ran into trouble, that redundancy is exactly what let NASA absorb the disruption: astronauts already trained and ready to fly simply moved onto Dragon flights instead of the schedule breaking down entirely. The system worked as designed, even though it did so at the direct expense of the original Starliner-1 crew’s timeline.
Whether Starliner recovers to fly a crewed mission on anything like its original schedule remains an open question that this reassignment does not answer. NASA and Boeing’s cargo only flight for Starliner-1 is intended to rebuild confidence in the propulsion system before astronauts are put back on top of it, and no firm date for a return to crewed Starliner flights has been set.
For now, the more concrete date is Kutryk’s own: no earlier than mid September, on a spacecraft he was not originally supposed to be flying, at the end of a three year wait that had very little to do with anything he did wrong.