Anil Menon, a 49-year-old emergency medicine physician and U.S. Space Force colonel born in Minneapolis to an Indian father and Ukrainian mother, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 14, 2026, aboard Soyuz MS-29 with Russian crewmates Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina for an eight-month mission as part of Expedition 74. The flight marks Menon as the first NASA astronaut of Malayali descent; his ancestral home is Chettur House in Ottapalam, Kerala. Coverage draws exclusively from two left-center sources.