A Minneapolis emergency physician, mechanical engineer, and U.S. Space Force colonel who spent years as a NASA expedition flight surgeon supporting crews on the International Space Station, NASA's 2021 astronaut select launches July 14 aboard a Russian Soyuz for an eight month…
Before he ever strapped into a Soyuz, Anil Menon spent years keeping other people alive in orbit. He worked as an emergency room physician, then as a NASA expedition flight surgeon supporting crews on the International Space Station. On July 14, the Minneapolis-born U.S. Space Force colonel will trade his support role for a seat of his own, launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft with two Roscosmos crewmates.
His crew, cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, will join the rotating crew of the International Space Station for Expeditions 74 and 75, spending roughly eight months in orbit and returning in the spring of 2027, according to NASA's prelaunch announcement. For Menon, the mission is also a first spaceflight, more than four years after his selection in NASA's 2021 astronaut class.
The path to that seat is unusual. Menon is a practicing emergency medicine physician, a mechanical engineer, and a colonel in the U.S. Space Force. He also spent several years as a NASA expedition flight surgeon, supporting station crews on the ground. He returned to NASA as an astronaut select in 2021.
His research role on the station leans on that same medical background. According to NASA, Menon and his crewmates will work on investigations of how veins, blood flow, and blood composition change in long-duration microgravity, and on a study testing whether the station's potable water supply can be processed on orbit into intravenous fluids usable in a medical emergency. The work targets a recurring problem in deep-space planning: how to keep a crew medically self-sufficient when resupply is months away and evacuation is not an option.
Menon's seat, paired with the two Roscosmos cosmonauts Dubrov and Kikina, continues a years-long practice of U.S. astronauts riding Soyuz to keep the station continuously staffed.
Reporters can question Menon directly in a series of prelaunch virtual interviews NASA will stream live from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, starting at 9 a.m. Eastern on Monday, June 22, 2026, with the conversation carried on NASA's YouTube channel. News organizations must request access by 5 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, via jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov.
What the interview is most likely to surface is not a standard "how did it feel" answer, but a working answer to a more operational question: what does a flight surgeon who has run medical support for crews on the ground actually plan to do differently when the patient is the entire station, and he is one of them.