One of NASA’s newly announced astronaut candidates already has a spaceflight under her belt.
On Monday (Sept. 22), the space agency announced the 10 members of its newest astronaut class — five men and five women who will train for potential missions to commercial space stations in Earth orbit, at the moon and (perhaps) on Mars.
One of the 10 is Anna Menon, who already has extensive experience in the final frontier: She flew to Earth orbit in September 2024 on SpaceX‘s pioneering Polaris Dawn mission.
Polaris Dawn was the first mission in the Polaris Program, an ambitious project organized and funded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. (Isaacman was in line to be NASA administrator until late May, when President Donald Trump pulled his nomination.)
Isaacman commanded Polaris Dawn, which sent him, pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and mission specialists Menon and Sarah Gillis — both SpaceX engineers — to Earth orbit aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Resilience” on Sept. 10, 2024.
The five-day mission made history in multiple ways. For example, it reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers), getting farther from Earth than any crewed spaceflight since the Apollo era. The Apollo missions were also male-only, so Gillis and Menon flew higher on Polaris Dawn than any woman ever had before.
In addition, Polaris Dawn featured the first-ever private spacewalk. Resilience’s hatch opened on Sept. 12, 2024, exposing all four crewmembers to the vacuum of space. Then, Isaacman and Gillis partially exited the capsule, earning unobstructed views of Earth far below.
Interestingly, 39-year-old Menon didn’t mention Polaris Dawn during her brief remarks at the astronaut-announcement ceremony on Monday, which was held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Rather, she focused on her biomedical background — she holds a master’s in biomedical engineering from Duke University — and what the future may hold in the field of space medicine.
“My first role out of graduate school was here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center,” Menon said on Monday. “I worked as a biomedical flight controller, and in that role, our job was to support the medical hardware and software on the International Space Station and help keep the astronauts healthy and safe from Mission Control. I am so thrilled to be back here with the NASA family.
“And, you know, as I reflect on the future of space medicine, I think it’s really bright,” she added. “We are born into one G, and so when you go into zero G, so many things change. As more and more people venture into space, and we seek to go further than ever before, we have this awesome opportunity to learn a tremendous amount to help support those astronauts and those people that are flying in those adventures and help keep them healthy and safe. So it’s an exciting time to be here, and I couldn’t be more thrilled and honored.”
Menon’s classmates in the 2025 NASA astronaut candidate class — the 24th in the agency’s history, and its first since 2021 — are Ben Bailey, Lauren Edgar, Adam Fuhrmann, Cameron Jones, Yuri Kubo, Rebecca Lawler, Imelda Muller, Erin Overcash and Katherine Spies. You can learn more about each of them in our announcement story.
The candidates will now undergo two years of training, which will prepare them for a variety of potential space missions. Some of these astronauts may end up going to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program — and some may even be among the first to set foot on Mars.
Menon isn’t the first person to reach orbit before being selected for a NASA astronaut class; a number of others did so during the space shuttle era. For example, Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri, Canada’s Steven MacLean and Italian Umberto Guidoni had all flown on the shuttle as international payload specialists before being chosen for NASA’s Group 16 astronaut class in 1996.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 10:35 a.m. ET on Sept. 23 to include a paragraph giving examples of other people who reached orbit before being chosen for a NASA astronaut class.
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