Who is Anna Kikina
Anna Yuryevna Kikina is a Russian engineer and test cosmonaut with Roscosmos, born on August 27, 1984. She is currently serving on Expedition 75 aboard the International Space Station as a flight engineer, on her second spaceflight, after being selected as a cosmonaut in 2012.
The first Russian cosmonaut on a Crew Dragon
Kikina holds a unique place in recent spaceflight history: on her first mission, launched in 2022 as part of Crew-5, she became the first Russian cosmonaut to fly aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Up to that point, Russian cosmonauts' access to the ISS had depended almost entirely on the Soyuz spacecraft, so that flight marked a turning point in how Russia and the United States share transport of their crews to the station.
Why the NASA-Roscosmos seat swap exists
That Crew-5 flight wasn't an isolated symbolic gesture — it was part of a seat-swap agreement between NASA and Roscosmos. Under that arrangement, a Russian cosmonaut flies on a US spacecraft while, in exchange, a US astronaut takes a seat on a Russian Soyuz. The logic behind the swap is purely operational: it guarantees that, no matter what happens, both countries always keep their own representation aboard the ISS, even if one of the two spacecraft — Crew Dragon or Soyuz — were to suffer a technical problem that took it out of service temporarily. That way neither partner depends entirely on the other's spacecraft to keep crew on the station.
On her second mission, now as part of Expedition 75, Kikina returns to the ISS with the experience of having been at the center of that first swap flight, and with first-hand knowledge of both Russian and US procedures on board.
Career stats
💡 Fun fact: before the Crew-5 mission, no Russian woman had ever flown to the station on a US spacecraft. Kikina broke that barrier on a flight designed, above all, to safeguard the ISS's operational continuity between two space programs that have collaborated for decades despite flying completely different spacecraft.
You can read more about her public profile on Wikipedia.
Want to know who else is on board with her?
See the full ISS crew