Baikonur Cosmodrome doesn't care much for ceremony. It's flat, it's dusty, and on Tuesday morning it hosted the launch of a Soyuz MS-29 rocket carrying three people who'd waited a combined couple of decades for this exact moment. Anil Menon was one of them.
Two orbits and just under three hours later, the capsule docked at the station's Prichal module 1:56 p.m. EDT, hatches open not long after and Menon floated into what's now his home for the next eight months.
His crewmates, cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, have both done this before. Menon hasn't. This is his first flight, and honestly, it's a little late in coming the man has been circling spaceflight, in one job or another, since roughly the Bush administration.
Here's the thing about Menon's resume: it doesn't read like someone building toward astronaut duty. It reads like someone who couldn't sit still.
Harvard, neurobiology, a thesis on Huntington's disease. Then a year off in India as a Rotary scholar, helping run polio vaccination drives not exactly the standard astronaut-track detour.
Stanford after that, twice: a master's in mechanical engineering, then medical school. Somewhere in there he also picked up an emergency medicine residency, a wilderness medicine fellowship, and because apparently three specialties weren't enough a second residency in aerospace medicine down in Galveston.
And that's just the classroom part.
He was on the ground as a first responder after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Same in Nepal, 2015. He spent time treating climbers on Everest through the Himalayan Rescue Association, deployed to Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, flew over a hundred sorties in F-15s with the Air National Guard, and hauled more than a hundred wounded patients as part of a critical care air transport crew.
NASA finally brought him on as a flight surgeon in 2014 - which, given everything above, feels almost like a footnote.
Four years of that, mostly supporting Soyuz crews from mission control, before SpaceX poached him in 2018 to build a medical program that didn't yet exist. He became the company's first flight surgeon. He was there for Demo-2 the flight that put American astronauts back on American rockets after nearly a decade of relying on the Russians and he stuck around through Inspiration4, the first all-civilian trip to orbit.
He also had a hand in the medical planning for Starship, which is supposed to eventually get someone to Mars.
By December 2021, NASA had apparently seen enough. Menon was one of ten picked out of more than 12,000 applicants that year. He started training the following January.
Menon's father, Shankaran Menon, comes from Ottapalam in Kerala family lore ties the line back further, to Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, who once presided over the Indian National Congress. His mother, Lisa Samoylenko, came to the U.S. from Ukraine. Menon grew up with both in Minneapolis, and today's launch makes him the first astronaut of Malayali descent to set foot on the ISS.
Once inside, he's joining a fairly packed house NASA's Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, ESA's Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos's Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev. Ten people up there until Menon's crew undocks again, sometime around April 2027.
The actual work he's been assigned leans straight into the medical background. Growing semiconductor crystals in microgravity the kind that eventually end up in AI chips and high-end computing hardware back on Earth.
Testing whether AI-assisted ultrasound could let a future Mars crew diagnose itself without radioing home for instructions. He's also volunteering himself as a data point, tracking how his own blood flow changes in freefall, and there's a bioprinting project in the mix aimed at understanding vascular aging.
One more thing on the list: figuring out how to turn the station's recycled water into usable IV fluid, which sounds unglamorous until you think about what it means for a crew three days from the nearest hospital.
His wife, Anna Menon, knows this world too she worked space operations at SpaceX, flew on Polaris Dawn, and is now training as a NASA astronaut candidate herself. They have two kids. Both Menons showed up briefly in Netflix's "Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space" a few years back, long before either of their own launches were on the calendar.
Right now, though, that's all 250 miles below him. Eight months on the station, semiconductor crystals and ultrasound scans and blood draws, and then if everything holds to schedule a Soyuz ride back down sometime next spring.
