The first long-duration resident of the ISS, a cosmonaut, has died

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.

Credit: Roscosmos Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev. Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev. Credit: Roscosmos

“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.

To ISS and back, twice

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.