Nine years ago, NASA flight surgeon Anil Menon felt crushed as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him.
For the fourth time, he diligently applied to the US Space Agency to become an astronaut to fulfill his lifelong dream. Although he made it to the final round, at the end of the grueling process, NASA rejected his application once again.
“I was very sad and admitted defeat,” Menon said. “I just didn’t see a way forward. So I gave up on being an astronaut at the time. I thought there was a zero percent chance.”
He was 39 years old. In 2017, Menon was half a decade older than the average age of astronaut candidates. He felt a door close and looked for a new one to open, taking time to think deeply about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
His life up to that point had not been without adventure—far from it. An emergency physician, Menon has served as a doctor on Mount Everest, helped in Port-au-Prince after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and conducted search and rescue missions with the US military in Afghanistan.
Contemplating what will happen next, Menon writes a journal every day about his passions, purpose and principles. Finally, he settled on space medicine. If he could not go to space, he would help others in this work. And collectively, humanity would advance. “I needed it to be clear in my mind,” Menon said.
It had to be, because Menon and his wife Anna were about to make some important decisions. Decisions that will result in not one of them, but both of them going into space.
Facing a difficult decision
After spending his childhood in the Midwest, Menon studied mechanical engineering at Stanford University and Harvard University in 2006 for a medical degree (neurobiology). He worked as an emergency physician in Los Angeles. He also joined the Air National Guard, became a pilot and served as a medic on search and rescue helicopters in Afghanistan.
