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on April 27, and requests for interviews should be submitted by the same deadline. S. media, while international media may request to conduct interviews virtually.
The Soyuz MS-29 mission, targeted to launch on 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 and began preparing for his first space station flight assignment after completing initial astronaut candidate training.
Born and raised in Minneapolis, Menon 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 a master's degree in mechanical engineering and a medical degree from Stanford University. Menon completed his emergency medicine and aerospace medicine residency at Stanford and the University of Texas Medical Branch, respectively.
For NASA, Menon has served as an expedition flight surgeon for the agency's crew members aboard the space station, and previously worked at SpaceX as the company's first flight surgeon, helping to launch the first crewed Dragon spacecraft on NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission in 2020. For more than 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. The station serves as a testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight, expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit, and prepare for deep space missions to the Moon as part of the Artemis program.