NASA Astronaut Anil Menon to Discuss Upcoming Launch, Mission

NASA will host a news conference at 1:45 p.m. EDT Wednesday, April 29, from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to preview Indian American astronaut Anil Menon’s upcoming mission to the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Anil Menon participates in a spacewalk training session at NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, Texas, ahead of his upcoming mission to the International Space Station. PHOTO: NASA/David DeHoyos

The news conference can be watched live on NASA’s YouTube channel. LThe Soyuz MS-29 mission, targeted to launch Tuesday, July 14, will carry Menon and his crewmates, Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, to the International Space Station for an eight-month stay as part of Expeditions 74/75. It will be Menon’s first spaceflight.

Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Menon graduated with the 23rd astronaut class in 2024. After completing initial astronaut candidate training, he began preparing for his first space station flight assignment.

Menon was born and raised in Minneapolis and is an emergency medicine physician, mechanical engineer, and lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University and also earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a medical degree from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Menon completed his emergency medicine and aerospace medicine residency at Stanford and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, respectively.

Menon still actively practices emergency medicine at Memorial Hermann’s Texas Medical Center and teaches residents at the University of Texas’ residency program.

For NASA, Menon also has served as an expedition flight surgeon for the agency’s crew members aboard the space station. Previously, Menon worked at SpaceX and served as the company’s first flight surgeon, helping to launch the first crewed Dragon spacecraft on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission in 2020 and building its medical organization to support humans on future missions.

The International Space Station has operated for more than 25 years, and people have lived and worked continuously aboard the ISS advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth.