Oleg Artemyev

Personal life and education

Artemyev was born in Riga, Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, present-day Latvia, on December 28, 1970, and grew up in Leninsk (now Baikonur), Kazakhstan. He graduated from the Tallinn Polytechnical School in 1990.

In 1998, he graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University with a degree in Low Temperature Technology and Physics. Artemyev graduated from the Russian Academy of State Service under the President of the Russian Federation in 2009, specializing in Personnel Management. He is married to Anna Sergeevna Malikhova.

Career

After finishing his studies, Artemyev completed his Soviet Army service in Vilnius, Lithuania, through 1991. Beginning in 1998, he was employed at RKKE, where he helped create testing methods for spacewalk equipment in a neutral buoyancy lab at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. He also served on the pre-launch team for the Zvezda Service Module, focusing on its spacewalk and remote-control systems. By 2000, he was medically approved to start specialized spaceflight training.

Cosmonaut career

Artemyev was selected as part of the RKKE-15 Cosmonaut group on May 29, 2003. In the following years, he entered Soyuz and ISS specific training. In 2006, together with American astronauts Michael Barrat and Sandra Magnus, Artemyev completed survival training as part of Soyuz training procedures. Again in June 2006, Artemyev, Yuri Lonchakov and Oleg Skripochka completed emergency water training in Sevastopol followed by another session of survival training with Sergei Revin and space tourist Charles Simony in January 2007.

In 2008, he was part of a testing campaign of the Orlan-MK space suit. As part of the Soyuz Processing Team, Artemyev worked at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 2010 and 2011. He was the descent module operator for the Soyuz TMA-01M mission. He also processed the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft that launched in 2011.

Expedition 66/67

Artemyev was a crew member in the 15-day and 105-day precursor studies of the MARS-500 program between 2007 and 2009. He launched on Expedition 39/40 on March 25, 2014, and returned to Earth on September 11, 2014. He launched on March 21, 2018 as part of Expedition 55/56, commanding Soyuz MS-08, and returned on October 5, 2018. He launched for the third time on March 18, 2022 onboard Soyuz MS-21, joining Expedition 66 and later Expedition 67.

On May 5, 2022, he assumed command of the International Space Station from NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn. He spent 195 days in space before returning to Earth on September 29, 2022 at 10:57 UTC. During Expedition 67, Artemyev participated in educational and cultural outreach activities, including presenting Mohabishwer Mohakash Fari, a Bengali-language book by Shah Jalal Jonak, described as the first Bengali-language book sent to the ISS. In early 2025, Artemyev was assigned as the backup to Oleg Platonov for the SpaceX Crew-11 mission, with the expectation that he would fly on the Crew-12 mission in early 2026.

SpaceX Crew-12

This assignment made him the first veteran cosmonaut slated to fly on the SpaceX Crew Dragon; all previous Russian crew members on the spacecraft had been first-time spaceflight participants. In December 2025, about two and a half months before launch, Artemyev was abruptly removed from the Crew-12 mission, with Roscosmos officially citing his 'transition to other work'. However, the investigative news site The Insider reported that he was expelled from the United States after being accused of violating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations by photographing SpaceX engines, documents, and other technologies with his phone and then using that phone to 'export' that information.

The alleged violation occurred at SpaceX's Hawthorne, California, facility in late November and prompted an interagency investigation. Artemyev was replaced by cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who became the first Russian to fly twice on Crew Dragon, reducing the amount of additional training required.