Sarah Gillis

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox astronaut Sarah Gillis is an American engineer employed by SpaceX as the senior space operations engineer. She is scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, operated by SpaceX on behalf of Jared Isaacman. During the mission, she is expected to attempt the first commercial spacewalk with Isaacman.

Early life and education

Gillis graduated from Shining Mountain Waldorf School in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2012. She obtained a degree in aerospace engineering from University of Colorado Boulder on the advice of her mentor, former NASA astronaut Joseph R. Tanner.<ref name=ShiningMountainWaldorfSchool>Template:Citation core{{#if:2022-02-16|}}</ref>

Career

In 2015, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, Gillis began an internship at SpaceX, working on human-in-the-loop testing of the Dragon spacecraft before moving full-time to the astronaut training program.Template:Citation needed

She is a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX, responsible for overseeing the astronaut training program for the company's Crew Dragon vehicles. She prepared NASA astronauts for the first Demo-2 and Crew-1 missions and more recently directly trained Inspiration4 astronauts, the first all-civilian crew to go into orbit. Gillis is an experienced Mission Control Operator, who has supported real-time operations for Dragon's cargo resupply missions to and from the International Space Station as a Navigation Officer and as Crew Operations and Resources Engineer (CORE) for crew Dragon missions, the SpaceX equivalent of the NASA CAPCOM role.<ref name="voice">Template:Cite news</ref>

Gillis is scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private spaceflight funded by Jared Isaacman.<ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> She will perform an extravehicular activity with Jared Isaacman.

Media coverage

Gillis appears in episodes 3, 4 and 5 in the 2021 Netflix series Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space.

See also

• Polaris program