Talgat Musabayev, a pilot and cosmonaut from Kazakhstan who flew on several space missions and conducted multiple spacewalks before becoming the head of his country’s space agency and a member of parliament, has died at the age of 74.  

Musabayev traveled on Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 1994, 1998 and 2001, logging nearly a year in orbit. He stayed on the Soviet-built Mir space station on the first two voyages and spent a week on the International Space Station for a week on the third trip. Dennis Tito, the first paying space tourist, was on that third expedition with Musabayev, an event that set the stage for the nascent space tourism industry involving companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. 

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev expressed his condolences to Musabayev’s family on Monday. 

Musabayev “is a hero who conquered space three times and performed spacewalks, glorifying our country with his feats,” Tokayev said in a statement. “He dedicated his entire working life to the progress of domestic cosmonautics. As a Senator and public figure, he initiated many good undertakings.”

Among Musabayev’s highlights in space was, as commander, welcoming American astronauts aboard the Mir station in 1998, three years before the station was abandoned and made a controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, mostly burning up in the process. Video shows Musabayev smiling broadly and embracing the Americans as they float through the hatch from the Discovery space shuttle into the Mir station. Musabayev gave a wrench to shuttle commander Charlie Precourt, saying it was a gift from Mir for the construction of the International Space Station. 

After his career as a cosmonaut ended in 2003, Musabayev was appointed head of KazCosmos, Kazakhstan’s space agency, in 2007 and then served as a senator in Kazakhstan’s parliament from 2017 to 2023. He received numerous awards for his contribution to space flight, not just from Kazakhstan but also Russia and NASA, the U.S. space agency. A commemorative stamp with his image was released in Kazakhstan a decade ago. 

In the mid-2000s, Musabayev became director of the joint Russian-Kazakh venture known as Baiterek, which aimed to build a new launch pad for the Soyuz-5 rocket at the Russia-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The goal was to replace deteriorating Soviet-era infrastructure and expand Kazakhstan’s own space ambitions, though the project ran into delays and funding problems.  

Dmitry Bakanov, head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, said last month that, as part of the Baiterek venture, the Soyuz-5 rocket will launch from Baikonur at the end of 2025, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported. 

Roscosmos also expressed condolences on learning of Musabayev’s death on Monday. 

Musabayev, who was born in the Almaty area, graduated with a degree in radio electronic equipment from the Riga Civil Aviation Engineers Institute in Latvia, then under Soviet control, in 1974. The engineering school, renamed the Transport and Telecommunication Institute, said in a tribute that the alumnus from Kazakhstan as “a person whose humility, intellect, and dedication left a lasting impression on everyone who had the privilege of meeting him.”

The cosmonaut, who was photographed playing the guitar on missions, maintained his passion for pushing the limits of space exploration. In 2014, he praised the mission of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft after its lander touched down on a comet, according to Tengrinews, a news outlet based in Kazakhstan. 

“This suggests that humanity has moved another few meters forward in the study of the outer space, of the deep cosmos,” Musabayev said. “And it shows that we are not focused only on orbital flights around the Earth. It is time to explore deep space.”