NASA and Roscosmos are finalizing a historic agreement to send the first cosmonaut on a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Crew-5 mission, slated for fall 2022.
At a press conference in Dubai on October 25, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin announced plans to fly cosmonauts on SpaceX's Crew Dragon to the ISS. NASA's ISS program manager, Joel Montalbano, recently confirmed that a cosmonaut will join the Crew-5 mission in fall 2022, followed by a NASA astronaut on a Soyuz flight. "The agencies are finalizing these plans through government agreements," Montalbano stated.
Roscosmos has selected Anna Kikina, the only active female cosmonaut in the Russian corps, for this groundbreaking flight. She has already begun training at SpaceX facilities and will crew with NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada—originally assigned to Boeing's Starliner—alongside Japan's Koichi Wakata.
Born on August 27, 1984, Anna Kikina earned an engineering degree in "Protection in Emergency Situations" from Novosibirsk State Academy of Water Transport in 2006. In 2008, she added an economist-manager qualification from the same institution. An avid runner, rafter, skydiver, reader, and filmmaker, she later hosted a show on Radio Siberia. In 2012, a colleague mentioned an open competition for test cosmonauts.
"It hit me like thunder. I was living my life, and suddenly this news about cosmonaut recruitment," she recalled. "I thought it was a joke at first, saying, 'Great, we're blasting off soon.' But when I realized it was real, I knew I wanted to be an astronaut."
After a year-long selection from eight winners, Anna was the sole woman chosen. Enlisted as a test cosmonaut in 2014, she has trained rigorously ever since. Her mission marks a milestone; the last Russian woman in space was Elena Serova, who spent 167 days on the ISS from September 2014 to March 2015—the fourth in Russian history.
