Russian cosmonaut of Greek descent Fyodor Nikolayevich Yurchikhin Grammatikopoulos will make a six-hour walk outside the ISS space station where he has been since April.

NASA TV will broadcast live the cosmonaut’s trip. The broadcast is schedule to start at 17:00 (Athens time) on Thursday 17 August.

58-year-old Yurchikhin Grammatikopoulos will be accompanied by a younger Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky.

Yurchikhin was awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation medal, the Order of Friendship medal (2003), the Order of the Phoenix (Greece), the NASA Space Flight Medal (2003), medals of the Federation of Cosmonautics and the title of Russian Federation Test-Cosmonaut (2003).

Yurchikhin was one of five cosmonauts selected to raise the Russian flag at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

Yurchikhin-Grammatikopoulos is engineer and RSC Energia test-pilot who has flown on five spaceflights.

His first spaceflight was a 10-day Space Shuttle mission STS-112. His second was a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a Flight Engineer for Expedition 15; for this mission he was launched in the Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft. He has undertaken two further long-duration stays aboard the ISS, as a crew member of Expedition 24 / 25. For this mission he was launched with the spacecraft Soyuz TMA-19, and he landed in November 2010, also with the TMA-19 spacecraft.

He served as Soyuz Commander for his fourth mission aboard Soyuz TMA-09M, as Flight Engineer for Expedition 36 and ISS Commander for Expedition 37.

In April 2017, Yurchikhin launched on Soyuz MS-04 for the fifth spaceflight of his career, a six month mission to the ISS as part of Expedition 51/52.

He is the current Commander of the International Space Station.

Yurchikhin was born in Batumi, Adjar ASSR, Georgian SSR (now Adjara the autonomous republic of Georgia) on 3 January 1959 to Pontic Greek parents Nikolai Fyodorovich Yurchikhin and Mikrula Sofoklevna Yurchikhina (born Eleni Grammatikopoulou – Ελένη Γραμματικοπούλου). His parents reside in Greece.

He is the first cosmonaut of Greek descent.

And Greeks are proud of him.

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