Sergey Mikayev

Sergey Mikayev belongs to the generation of Russian cosmonauts who came of age long after the Space Race, born in the early 1980s in Irkutsk, in the heart of Siberia. His route to orbit ran through the military, not the sciences: he trained as a military aviator, graduated from the Krasnodar Higher Military Aviation School of Pilots, and rose to the rank of major in the Russian Air Force. That pilot's résumé — precision flying, systems discipline, and the temperament to stay calm at speed — is exactly the profile Roscosmos looked for when it opened its 17th cosmonaut group. Mikayev was selected into that group in 2018 and began the years-long grind of flight-engineer training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, learning the Soyuz spacecraft and Russian segment of the International Space Station system by system.

What followed was an unusually long wait. Mikayev was selected in 2018 but did not fly until November 2025 — a seven-year gap that reflected how much the human-spaceflight landscape had changed. As SpaceX's Crew Dragon took over the bulk of ISS crew rotations, the cadence of available Soyuz seats slowed, and cosmonauts spent longer in the backup pipeline. Mikayev first served as a reserve crew member and backup flight engineer for Soyuz MS-27, then was assigned to the prime crew of Soyuz MS-28. That spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket on 27 November 2025 — U.S. Thanksgiving Day — carrying Mikayev alongside veteran Roscosmos commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Chris Williams. After the familiar fast-track rendezvous, the crew docked to the station the same day to join Expedition 74, and Mikayev finally became a spacefarer at his first attempt after seven years of preparation.

As a first-time flight engineer, Mikayev's work aboard the ISS centers on the routine that keeps a laboratory alive in orbit: maintaining the Russian segment's life-support and power systems, running the roster of microgravity science experiments, and handling the cargo and station-keeping tasks that fall to the Soyuz crew. His mission is planned as a long-duration expedition of roughly eight months, in line with the extended Soyuz rotations now typical of the station, with a return to Earth expected in the summer of 2026. Mikayev remains an active cosmonaut, currently serving in orbit on that first flight; with only one mission behind him he has not yet performed a spacewalk. His significance is less about records than about continuity — he represents the steady renewal of Russia's cosmonaut corps and the enduring partnership that still puts Russian and American crewmates side by side in the same capsule, even as the commercial era reshapes how humans reach low Earth orbit.