Arutyun Kiviryan has been assigned to NASA’s SpaceX Crew-14 mission to the International Space Station, putting him in line to become the second Armenian to reach space.
The 4 crew members launch no earlier than spring 2027 for a long-duration science expedition, NASA said. Kayla Barron and Chris Birch of NASA serve as spacecraft commander and pilot, with Makoto Suwa of Japan’s JAXA and Kiviryan of Roscosmos as mission specialists. The crew joins Expedition 75/76 after docking.
It is the 14th commercial crew rotation with SpaceX under NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, and the crew will run scientific investigations and technology demonstrations aimed at future missions to the Moon and Mars.
Kiviryan was born on August 23, 1993 in Maykop, in the Russian republic of Adygea, into a Hamshen Armenian family. The Hamshen are Armenians from the Black Sea coast near Trabzon who were scattered by Ottoman persecution and settled along the Russian shoreline, with large communities in Krasnodar Krai and Adygea. His father is a beekeeper.
He graduated from the Saint Petersburg Suvorov Military School in 2010 and from the Baltic State Technical University in 2015 as an engineer specializing in rocket science. He then worked as a test engineer at RKK Energia, the company founded by Sergei Korolev.
Roscosmos selected him for the Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center corps in 2021, making him the first Armenian admitted to the Soviet or Russian cosmonaut corps in its history. He passed the state examination completing the 2-year general space training course in June 2023 and has served as a test cosmonaut since.
He was assigned to the backup crew for Crew-13 before this assignment moved him to a prime crew. That mission slipped to early October after an oxidizer leak was found in the Dragon spacecraft’s propulsion system.
The first Armenian in space was James Bagian, an Armenian-American physician and engineer born in Philadelphia in 1952. NASA selected him in 1980, and he flew aboard Discovery on STS-29 in 1989 and on STS-40 in 1991, logging 337 hours in space. He remains the only Armenian to have flown.
Kiviryan has visited Armenia twice and laid flowers at the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial on both visits.
Asked in 2024 what he wanted most, he said reaching the Moon would be like conquering Ararat. “My cherished dream is to visit the Moon. Every cosmonaut dreams of this deep down,” he said. “The history of humanity began on Earth, and the Moon could become a new page in that chronicle.”
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