Aidyn Aimbetov

Aidyn Aimbetov was born in 1972 in Kazakhstan and came to spaceflight through military aviation. After graduating from the Kutakhov Armavir Higher Military Aviation School he served as a fighter pilot with the Kazakh Air Force, flying MiG-27 and Su-27 aircraft from bases including Lugovaya and Taldykorgan. In 2002 he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate under Kazakhstan's national program, Kazcosmos, and trained in Russia — but a flight assignment did not come. For thirteen years he waited without a mission, a period long enough that many candidates would have retired before their opportunity arrived.

His chance came unexpectedly in 2015. The British singer Sarah Brightman had booked a self-funded tourist flight to the International Space Station but withdrew from training that May, and her backup also stepped aside, freeing the seat. Aimbetov was assigned in her place, and on 2 September 2015 he launched from Baikonur aboard Soyuz TMA-18M with commander Sergey Volkov of Russia and Danish ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen. Flying as a flight engineer on this short-duration 'visiting' expedition, he spent ten days in orbit, most of it aboard the ISS, conducting scientific experiments before returning to Earth on 12 September aboard a different capsule, Soyuz TMA-16M, as part of the standard Soyuz seat-rotation. The flight made him the third Kazakh-born person to reach space and, notably, the first to fly under the flag of an independent Kazakhstan rather than as a Soviet-era cosmonaut.

Aimbetov's mission carried real national significance for a country whose soil hosts the Baikonur Cosmodrome — the launch site of the entire crewed spaceflight era — yet had waited decades to send up a cosmonaut of its own under its own banner. He was honored as a People's Hero of Kazakhstan (Khalyk Kakharmany), received the Order of Otan, and was granted the title Pilot-Cosmonaut of Kazakhstan. Now retired from active spaceflight, he became a public advocate for the national space program, speaking about sustaining younger Kazakhs' interest in space exploration. His single flight stands as a milestone in Kazakhstan's post-independence space identity, achieved after one of the longest waits between selection and launch in the history of human spaceflight.