Anton Shkaplerov

Early life

Shkaplerov was born in Sevastopol, Crimea, to Nikolay Ivanovich Shkaplerov and Tamara Viktorovna Shkaplerova. He learned to fly a Yakovlev Yak-52 in 1989, the same year he graduated from Sevastopol High School. He then entered the Kachinsk Air Force Pilot School, graduating as a pilot-engineer in 1994, and later graduated from N. E. Zukovskiy Air Force Engineering School in 1997. His hobbies include sports, travel, fishing, and golf.

Cosmonaut career

Anton Shkaplerov began his career as a senior pilot-instructor in the Russian Air Force after graduating in 1997, flying Yak-52, L-29, and MiG-29 aircraft. He holds the rank of Class 2 Air Force pilot-instructor and is also an Instructor of General Parachute Training, with more than 300 parachute jumps to his name. In May 2003, he was chosen as a test-cosmonaut candidate at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, completing basic space training and qualifying as a test cosmonaut in June 2005.

In 2007, he worked as Director of Operations for the Russian Space Agency at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and was later named back-up commander for Expedition 22. His first spaceflight came as a Flight Engineer on Expedition 29/30, commanding Soyuz TMA-22, which launched on 16 November 2011 with Anatoli Ivanishin and Dan Burbank. During that mission, he and Oleg Kononenko performed a six-hour spacewalk on 12 February 2012 to install shields on the Zvezda Service Module and relocate the Strela 1 crane.

The crew spent 165 days in space, returning on 27 April 2012. He commanded Soyuz TMA-15M, launching on 23 November 2014 with Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts, docking six hours later to join Expedition 42. That mission lasted 199 days, ending on 11 June 2015, bringing his total time in space to 365 days. On 17 December 2017, he launched on Soyuz MS-07 as flight engineer of Expedition 54 and commander of Expedition 55.

On 2 February 2018, he and Alexander Misurkin completed an 8-hour 13-minute spacewalk to replace an electronics box for a communications antenna, setting a record for the longest Russian spacewalk.