---
title: "Abdul Ahad Momand, the Only Afghan to Fly in Space, Dies at 66"
description: "Abdul Ahad Momand, the Afghan Air Force pilot who in 1988 became the first and only citizen of Afghanistan to travel to space — brewing tea and photographing his homeland from orbit — has died in Germany at 66."
category: "World"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/world
author: "Gabriela Soto"
published: 2026-06-29T20:48:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-29T20:48:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/abdul-ahad-momand-the-only-afghan-to-fly-in-space-dies-at-66
tags: ["obituary", "space", "Afghanistan", "Soviet Union", "Interkosmos", "Mir", "cosmonaut"]
---
# Abdul Ahad Momand, the Only Afghan to Fly in Space, Dies at 66

Abdul Ahad Momand, the Afghan Air Force pilot who in 1988 became the first and only citizen of Afghanistan to travel to space — brewing tea and photographing his homeland from orbit — has died in Germany at 66.

For nine days in the late summer of 1988, an Afghan colonel looked down on a country at war from a vantage no compatriot had reached before — or has since.

## A son of Ghazni who reached orbit

Abdul Ahad Momand was born in 1959 in Ghazni Province, in Afghanistan's mountainous heartland, and trained as a fighter pilot in the Soviet Union, eventually rising to colonel in the Afghan Air Force. That Soviet connection opened an improbable door. On August 29, 1988, Momand lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard [Soyuz TM-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TM-6), traveling under the Soviet [Interkosmos program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interkosmos), which carried guest cosmonauts from allied nations — Cuba, India, Syria, France and others — into orbit as a show of Cold War reach.

## Nine days aboard Mir

Two days after launch, his capsule docked with the Mir space station, then humanity's most ambitious orbital outpost, where Momand spent about nine days as a cosmonaut-researcher before returning to Earth on September 6, [according to Wikipedia's account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Ahad_Momand). He photographed Afghanistan from above — a country then in the last months of a brutal war — and took part in scientific experiments. He also brought a measure of home with him, brewing Afghan tea for the crew, and reciting verses of the Quran in orbit. For a nation that had known little but conflict for a decade, those nine days made him a figure of singular pride.

## Exile and a quiet life

The Afghanistan Momand returned to did not hold together for long. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the fall of the communist government in 1992, the country fractured into civil war, and Momand left. He settled in Germany, where he was naturalized in 2003 and lived near Stuttgart, working in ordinary jobs far from the cosmonaut training centers of his earlier life — the trajectory of a generation of educated Afghans scattered across Europe and North America.

## A legacy written in orbit

For Afghans at home and in exile, Momand remained a rare and uncomplicated symbol: proof that one of their own had been counted among those who left the Earth entirely. His mission predated the Taliban, the American invasion and the collapse of 2021, standing apart from everything that followed. He was the only Afghan ever to fly in space, and no successor has followed him. He died on June 21 in Stuttgart at 66; no cause of death was announced.

## Sources

- [Abdul Ahad Momand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Ahad_Momand)
- [Soyuz TM-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TM-6)
- [Interkosmos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interkosmos)