Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko will travel to the International Space Station in the spring of 2023. The commander of the “Roskosmos” cosmonaut corps spoke about the planned flight in an interview with “Moskvich Mag”.

“Now I am preparing for the fifth flight. It is scheduled for March of the next year. Lots of physical training, preliminary research work. This is a huge and exciting part of being in space. We mainly work in accordance with the federal space program. It describes the experiments that are being carried out on board, on the Russian segment of the international space station. Depending on the experience, the level of preparedness of each cosmonaut while still on earth, experts distribute, who will do what experiment. We conduct some research in the biomedical part on ourselves or help each other. Until now, the reactions of the body, its capabilities in a state of weightlessness in space have not been fully studied”, said Kononenko.

Oleg Kononenko was born in 1964 in the Turkmen city of Chardchou (now Turkmenabat), where he graduated from secondary school №. 15. In 1988 he graduated from the Kharkov Aviation Institute with a degree in aircraft engines.

In 2008 Kononenko made his first space flight to the International Space Station (ISS). In total, he made four flights to the space station, and also broke the record for the total time spent on the ISS, spending 737 days in space. And on December 11, 2018, he went out into open space for the fifth time to inspect the skin of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, the duration of the exit was 7 hours and 45 minutes. The total duration of the five spacewalks was 32 hours and 13 minutes.

Hero of Russia (2009) and Turkmenistan (2019) Oleg Kononenko is a holder of one of the highest awards of independent neutral Turkmenistan - the Order of the “Star of the President”.