Dmitri Kondratyev

Cosmonaut career

Kondratyev was selected as a test-cosmonaut candidate at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in December 1997. He underwent basic space training from January 1998 to March 2000 and qualified as a test-cosmonaut that year. In 2003 he completed training as a member of the ISS Expedition 5 Backup crew, serving as Soyuz Commander and ISS Flight Engineer. He later trained for the Expedition 13 prime crew in the same roles for a year and a half until the crew was reassigned to include ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter.

Kondratyev also completed training for the Expedition 20 Backup crew as Soyuz Commander and ISS Flight Engineer. He earned a U.S. FAA Private Pilot License in March 2007 and an FAA Airline Transport Pilot Licence in March 2009. Assigned to the Expedition 26/27 prime crew as Soyuz Commander and Expedition 27 Commander, he launched to the station on 15 December 2010 aboard Soyuz TMA-20. During his stay he performed two spacewalks.

The first, on 21 January 2011, was a Russian EVA designated #27, conducted with cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka. Kondratyev, designated Extravehicular 1 with a red stripe on his spacesuit, and Skripochka opened the Pirs hatch at 9:29 a.m. EST and spent five hours and 23 minutes outside.

They deployed an antenna for the Radio Technical System for Information Transfer, an experimental system capable of downlinking large data files at about 100 MB/s from the Russian segment. The spacewalk concluded at 2:52 p.m. EST.

Did You Know?

• Kondratyev performed more than 150 parachute jumps and is an instructor of General Parachute Training.
• During his first spacewalk, Kondratyev and Oleg Skripochka removed a plasma pulse generator from the Zvezda module and returned it inside the Pirs airlock.
• Kondratyev graduated from the Moscow State University for Economy, Statistics and Computer Science in 2000 as an economist.
• He served as Director of Operations for the Russian Space Agency at the Johnson Space Center from 2 May 2006 through 9 April 2007.