A Malayali kid from Minneapolis just called Earth from space… and thanked everyone by name.
Anil Menon, NASA's first astronaut of Malayali heritage, has arrived at the International Space Station to kick off an eight-month mission.
His first words back home?
Not science jargon.
Just gratitude.
Menon rode the Soyuz MS-29 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, alongside Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina.
Launch to docking took just three hours.
He's now one of 10 people living on the ISS, part of Expedition 74 — and later, Expedition 75.
He won't be back on Earth until April 2027.
That's how he opened his message.
Overwhelmed by gratitude. Love. Beauty.
Then he did something rare for a historic first — he made it personal.
An emergency medicine doctor.
A Space Force Colonel.
A man who treated combat wounds in Afghanistan and altitude sickness on Everest.
Before space, he'd already lived several lifetimes.
He studied neurobiology at Harvard, then engineering and medicine at Stanford.
He joined NASA in 2014 as a flight surgeon.
In 2018, he moved to SpaceX, building its medical program from scratch and helping prep the company's first-ever crewed missions.
His wife, Anna Wilhelm, flew to orbit herself on SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission in 2024.
Two spacefarers. One household.
His father is from Ottapalam, Kerala. His mother emigrated from Ukraine.
A genuinely global story, wrapped into one orbit.
For the next eight months, Menon will run hundreds of experiments spanning medicine, biology and physics — the unglamorous work that quietly builds humanity's road to Mars.
But on Day 1, he just wanted to say thank you.
That's all for now!
