Abdul Ahad Momand

Following the collapse of Najibullah's government in 1992, Momand decided to emigrate to Germany, and applied for asylum there, becoming a German citizen via naturalisation in 2003. He worked in the printing service and is now an accountant residing in Ostfildern near Stuttgart.

He became one of Soyuz TM-6 crew members and spent nine days aboard the Mir space station in 1988 as an Intercosmos Research Cosmonaut. He holds many records as an Afghan Astronaut. During this mission, Abdul Ahad Momand was the first cosmonaut to speak the Pashto language after he made a telephone call to Afghanistan, making it the fifth language to be officially spoken in space. He became the first Afghan citizen and the fourth Muslim to visit outer space, after Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, Muhammed Faris, and Musa Manarov.

Along with Commander Vladimir Lyakhov and Flight Engineer Valery Polyakov, Momand was part of the Soyuz TM-6 three-man crew, which launched at 04:23 GMT 29 August 1988. Momand's inclusion in the mission was a significant symbol during the Soviet–Afghan War.

Momand was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on 7 September 1988.

Abdul Ahad Momand (Pashto: عبدالاحد مومند; born 1959) is a Afghan-German and former Afghan Air Force aviator who became the first, and currently only, Afghan citizen to journey to outer space.

Momand was born sometime in 1959 in Sardeh Band, Andar District, within the Ghazni Province of Afghanistan. He belongs to the Momand tribe of the Pashtun ethnic group. After completing his initial schooling, he entered the Kabul Polytechnic University in 1976 at the age of 17, and graduated a year later before being drafted into the military in 1978. He was then sent to the Soviet Union for pilot training. There, he studied at the Krasnodar Higher Air Force School and the Kiev Higher Air Force Engineering School before returning to Afghanistan in 1981, where he rose through the ranks, becoming a chief navigator. He returned to the USSR in 1984 to train at the Gagarin Air Force Academy. Not long after graduating in 1987, he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate for the Intercosmos project. The other cosmonaut candidate sent for training was Mohammad Dawran, a Tajik MiG-21 pilot with the rank of Colonel. While Dawran had more political connections than Momand and held a higher military rank (since Momand was a captain at the time), Dawran's appendicitis was the deciding factor in Momand being chosen for the primary crew. Dawran then became part of the backup crew for Momand's mission.