NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos are finalizing an agreement to launch the first cosmonaut aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. This great first will be part of the Crew-5 mission, which is scheduled to launch in a few months.
During a press conference held in Dubai on October 25, Dimitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, announced that he planned to fly cosmonauts aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. Until now, the timetable was still unclear. A few days ago, NASA's International Space Station (ISS) program manager Joel Montalbano finally said the plan was to launch a cosmonaut on board the Crew-5 mission scheduled for fall 2022 , "then to launch a NASA astronaut on an upcoming Soyuz mission ". “The agency is currently finalizing these plans through government agreements “, he added.
According to Roscosmos, the selected cosmonaut is Anna Kikina, the only active woman in the Russian cosmonaut corps . She would have already started training at SpaceX facilities. As a member of the Crew-5 mission, Kikina will join Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, NASA astronauts who were originally assigned to the Starliner (Boeing) capsule's first crewed mission, and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. .
Born on August 27, 1984, Anna Kikina graduated in 2006 with an engineering degree "Protection in emergency situations" from the Novosibirsk State Academy of Water Transport. Two years later, this passionate runner, rafter, skydiver, reader and filmmaker earned another degree from the same university, this time as an economist-manager. A few years later, she made a career change. Kikina becomes a host on Radio Siberia. She learned there in 2012 the opening of a general competition for the position of test cosmonaut .
“It was like a thunderclap. I was living my life, and then a colleague from the radio announced that the recruitment to join the detachment of cosmonauts was open", she recalls. "I took this news as a joke and joked, 'That's right, we're going to take off soon. And when I found out that was true, I found myself thinking that I really wanted to be an astronaut “.
The selection will have lasted about a year. Of the eight contest winners, Anna is the only woman. She was enlisted for the post of test cosmonaut in 2014 and since then she has been preparing. His work will finally be rewarded next year. Recall that the last Russian woman to have traveled in space was Elena Serova (167 days on board the ISS from September 2014 to March 2015). She then became the fourth woman in space in the country's history.
