NASA astronaut Anil Menon set for eight-month first mission aboard the International Space Station

NASA astronaut Anil Menon, an Indian-American physician, engineer and military officer, is preparing for his first spaceflight: a roughly 240-day stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Menon will lift off on July 14, 2026, aboard the Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, travelling with Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. The crew is expected to return to Earth in the spring of 2027.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to immigrants from India and Ukraine, Menon earned a bachelor's degree in neurobiology at Harvard, followed by a medical degree and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. He completed residencies in emergency medicine and aerospace medicine and holds board certification in both fields.

Before joining the astronaut corps, Menon served as a NASA flight surgeon, a doctor responsible for the health of astronauts living and working on the ISS, and trained in Star City, Russia, to assist with Soyuz flights. He later became SpaceX's first flight surgeon, developing the company's astronaut medical systems and assisting with its Demo-2 mission. NASA selected him as an astronaut candidate in 2021, and he completed the two-year training programme in 2024.

Aboard the station, Menon will run experiments relevant to future Moon and Mars missions, examining how microgravity, the near-weightlessness of orbit, affects blood flow, vein structure and blood composition in astronauts. He will also help test technology for producing intravenous fluids from the station's potable water system, a capability that could become critical on deep-space missions where medical supplies are limited. A certified flight instructor with more than 1,000 hours of flying experience, Menon has also completed demanding endurance events, including Ironman competitions.