// ARS TECHNICA — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
The first long-duration resident of the ISS, a cosmonaut, has died
Two expeditions, two spacewalks, 322 days in space.
Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.
With Samokutyaev’s death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.
“The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich,” officials with Russia’s space agency said in a statement.
Samokutyaev joined the cosmonaut corps in 2003. Two years later, after his basic training, he qualified for spaceflight assignments.
He launched for the first time on April 4, 2011, flying as the commander of Soyuz TMA-21 with flight engineers Andrey Borisenko from Roscosmos and NASA astronaut Ron Garan. Their spacecraft was named Gagarin in honor of the world’s first human in space, who had lifted off 50 years earlier from the same launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Samokutyaev served as a flight engineer on the space station’s 27th and 28th expedition crews. In addition to Borisenko and Garan, he worked with Dmitri Kondratyev of Roscosmos, Cady Coleman of NASA, and Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) for about a month and Sergey Volkov of Roscosmos, Mike Fossum with NASA, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa for the second part of his stay.
On July 10, 2011, the US space shuttle Atlantis arrived at the space station, and for nine days, the four STS-135 astronauts joined Samokutyaev and his Expedition 28 colleagues aboard the orbiting laboratory. Not only was it the last time that a shuttle would visit the ISS, but it was the final mission of the 30-year program.
On August 3, 2011, Samokutyaev performed his first spacewalk, venturing outside of the ISS with Volkov to relocate equipment, install a materials science experiment, and hand-deploy a micro-satellite.
After 164 days in Earth orbit, Samokutyaev returned to Earth on Soyuz TMA-21 with Borisenko and Garan, landing safely on the steppe of Kazakhstan.