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Science
Estelle Timar-Wilcox

Minnesota astronaut set to make his first trip to the International Space Station

A man in a NASA uniform in front of an Earth background.
Anil Menon was born and raised in Minnesota and will launch on Tuesday on his first mission to the International Space Station.
MPR News via Riverside

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An astronaut from Minneapolis will make his first trip to the International Space Station Tuesday.

Anil Menon plans to be on board the space station for eight months. While there, he’ll work on a range of technology and medical research projects, including production of semiconductor crystals and in-space ultrasound medical monitoring.

Before his astronaut career, Menon grew up in Minneapolis and later trained as a physician. He has worked as a flight surgeon for NASA and SpaceX; this will be his first space flight.

Speaking to MPR News last year, Menon said he’d spent two years in training for the trip. He said space is a unique place to use his training as a physician, with limited access to equipment and other doctors.

“This is really the extreme of wilderness medicine, so it’s very cool if you're into those kind of challenges and helping people in unique ways like that,” Menon said.

He said he got the idea of being an astronaut on a trip to the Science Museum of Minnesota as a kid, watching a documentary about space travel.

“I couldn’t believe that that was a career. My mom worked at a pizza place and my dad was doing computer programming, so it planted a seed, and I hung on to it for a very long time,” Menon said.

The spacecraft will launch Tuesday morning from Kazakhstan. Menon will make the trip with two astronauts from Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. They’ll join seven astronauts who are currently working on the space station.

The spacecraft is set to launch at 9:47 a.m. central time and will orbit the earth twice before docking on the International Space Station. NASA will stream the launch in the morning, and the opening of the hatch and welcoming of the astronauts on board the station, scheduled to start at 2:30 p.m. CDT.

That will all be available on NASA’s website.