India is likely to etch its footprints in space once again. Indian-origin astronaut, Anil Menon, a lieutenant colonel with the US Air Force and SpaceX’s first flight surgeon, has been selected by NASA among a total of ten astronauts for its Moon Mission.
The US space agency announced the selection of its newest class of astronauts late on Monday. Six men and four women were chosen from more than 12,000 people who applied to the space agency in March 2020. Upon completing their training, they will have some exciting spaceflight opportunities ahead of them.
They are all going to be part of the Artemis Generation, which aims to send the first woman and the first person of color to the lunar surface as early as 2025 (a landing date that is considered incredibly ambitious).
“Today, we welcome 10 new explorers — 10 members of the Artemis generation. It was the Apollo generation, and that did so much for so many. Now it’s the Artemis generation,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said during the ceremony.
He will report for duty in January 2022 to complete two years of initial astronaut training as a NASA astronaut candidate.
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Who Is Anil Menon?
Menon was born in 1976 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He started his career as a doctor by enrolling in Harvard University, where he studied neurobiology and conducted research on Huntington’s disease. He later attended Stanford Medical School, where he studied engineering and medicine and worked on coding soft tissue models at NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley, California.
Menon was deployed twice with the US Air Force critical care air transport team to treat and transport wounded warriors during his aerospace training. He was later transferred to the Air Force reserves, 45th operational group, Detachment 3 of the 45th Space Wing, to provide medical direction for launch and landings. He logged over 100 sorties in the F-15 fighter jet and transported over 100 patients as part of the critical care air transport team.
Menon started as a NASA flight surgeon in 2014 and supported four long-duration crew members on the ISS as the deputy crew surgeon for Soyuz missions Soyuz 39 and Soyuz 43 and prime crew surgeon for Soyuz 52.
A few years back in 2018, Menon joined SpaceX, where he started its medical program and helped prepare for its first human flights. He served as the lead flight surgeon for five launches and helped create their research program and private astronaut programs and develop their Starship.
Apart from this, Anil Menon also spent a year in India as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar to study and support polio vaccination. He was the first responder during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the 2011 Reno Air Show accident.