Andrey Fedyaev

Andrey Valeryevich Fedyaev was born on 26 February 1981 in Serov, an industrial town in the Sverdlovsk region of the Ural Mountains, then part of the Soviet Union. He built his early career in Russian military aviation, graduating from the Balashov Military Aviation School in 2004 and serving in Naval Aviation, where he flew and eventually served as a deputy commander of an Ilyushin Il-38 anti-submarine patrol unit in the Kamchatka region of the Russian Far East. He reached the rank of major and logged more than 600 flight hours before retiring from military service. In 2012 Roscosmos selected him to its cosmonaut corps; he reported to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow and was certified as a test cosmonaut in 2014, then spent years in the assignment and training pipeline that precedes a first flight.

Fedyaev's first spaceflight came on 2 March 2023, when he launched as a mission specialist aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour on the Crew-6 mission — an assignment made possible by the NASA–Roscosmos seat-exchange arrangement that cross-integrates the two partners' crews. In doing so he became only the second Russian cosmonaut ever to fly aboard an American Crew Dragon, after Anna Kikina, a milestone that underscored the unusual persistence of U.S.–Russian cooperation in orbit even amid tensions on the ground. He flew with NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg and Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi, joining Expeditions 68 and 69, and returned to Earth with a splashdown on 4 September 2023 after about 186 days in space. Nearly three years later he flew again: on 13 February 2026 he launched on his second mission, SpaceX Crew-12, once more as a mission specialist, joining the long-duration Expedition 74 crew alongside NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot.

Across his two missions Fedyaev has accumulated close to a year in orbit, and Russia recognized his service with its highest honors for a spacefarer, the titles Hero of the Russian Federation and Pilot-Cosmonaut of the Russian Federation, conferred in 2024. As an active Roscosmos cosmonaut, he has become a familiar figure in the era of integrated international crews, a naval aviator turned cosmonaut who has twice ridden an American commercial spacecraft to a station built and operated jointly by the world's spacefaring nations. His career stands as a practical demonstration that the human spaceflight partnership between Russia and the United States has continued through the transition from the Space Shuttle to commercial crew vehicles, with cosmonauts and astronauts still routinely flying on one another's spacecraft.