Station Crew Wraps Week Packing Dragon and Growing Plants

Expedition 75 closed its working week aboard the International Space Station on Friday, November 13, 2026, the way long missions actually run. NASA's station log lists space botany and biomedical research through the day, with the crew also loading a U.S. cargo spacecraft for its departure and return to Earth.

NASA flight engineer Luke Delaney investigated how plants grow and fight disease in microgravity, work that sounds quiet and isn't. A crew headed to the Moon or Mars can't resupply fresh food or a failed crop, so a plant that gets sick in a growth chamber is a logistics problem, not a gardening problem. The station is where that failure gets studied while a grocery run is still possible.

The biomedical work runs in parallel, and the crew is both staff and subject. Researchers use the station's long stays to track what months of weightlessness do to bone, muscle, vision and circulation, and every sample drawn in orbit is a data point that can't be reproduced in a clinic on the ground.

Two crew members, Menon and Watkins in NASA's log, spent part of Friday packing and securing cargo inside the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that arrived at the station on October 15. The loaded Dragon carries research samples back down for retrieval by NASA and SpaceX teams after its splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, which is the only leg of the experiment where gravity does the handling.

That return trip is the station's real bottleneck. Experiments can run for months in the racks, but their results reach a laboratory only when a cargo vehicle carries them home, so the packing list is a triage. Samples that degrade get priority, hardware that failed gets a ride for its autopsy, and everything else waits for the next vehicle.

The week's mix is also a fair picture of what the station is for in 2026. It isn't hosting a single headline experiment. It's a working laboratory where agriculture, medicine and freight share the same crew hours, and where the measure of a week is racks run, samples secured and a spacecraft loaded on schedule.

NASA published the log on November 13 with Mark A. Garcia's byline on the agency's station blog. The next milestone in the sequence it describes is the Dragon's undocking and Pacific splashdown, when the samples packed this week start the last leg back to the researchers waiting on them.

The station's Expedition 75 rotation also explains the week's unglamorous tone. Mid-expedition weeks aren't built around spacewalks or visiting vehicles. They're built around the research schedule itself, maintenance that keeps the laboratory running, and the steady accumulation of data that justifies the program's cost. A week with no headline is usually a week where the science plan ran closest to the plan on paper, and mission managers count those weeks as the productive core of a six-month stay in orbit.