Scott “Kid” Poteet grew up in the 1980s watching the original “Top Gun” and spent a career flying fighter jets at Mach 2 — which is a fraction of the speed of the capsule that he’s scheduled to pilot into space this summer.
Sarah Gillis was a classically trained violinist headed for a music career when she met a NASA astronaut who encouraged her to pivot and become an engineer. Now she trains astronauts and is set to travel with them 1,400 kilometers above the Earth.
Poteet and Gillis are half of the four-person crew of Polaris Dawn, a private space mission funded by billionaire space-tourism entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and scheduled to launch as soon as Aug. 1. Poteet is a retired U.S. Air Force pilot who until recently lived in Colorado Springs, and Gillis is a Boulder native and 2017 graduate of the University of Colorado.
The crew, flying in a SpaceX capsule called the Dragon, will attempt to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown and try the first-ever commercial spacewalk.
Their mission could face further delays after the failure to launch this month of the SpaceX rocket, the Falcon 9, that is supposed to send the Polaris Dawn capsule into space. The goal is to understand more about how long-duration space travel will affect human health and is considered by SpaceX as another step toward making it possible for regular people, who aren’t trained astronauts, to live on the moon or Mars.
“If we have goals of colonizing the moon and Mars and building these communities, it’s going to need engineers, it’s going to need medical professionals, anything and everything you can think of to build a community,” Poteet said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “You’re going to need to be able to create these environments on these planets in the future.”
The Polaris Dawn mission is one of several information-gathering trips needed before the future travel of SpaceX’s mega-rocket, Starship. The company says Starship will someday take up to 100 passengers on trips to Mars. For now, though, Starship has been hired to take NASA astronauts to the moon.
The space flight that will include Poteet and Gillis, along with medical officer Anna Menon and mission commander Isaacman, is the first of three planned Polaris missions. The crew plans to help conduct 38 experiments about human health in space, including some in conjunction with CU Boulder.
It will also test laser-based communications for Starlink, the satellite internet constellation that provides broadband internet to users around the world. Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, and both companies are owned by Elon Musk.
Musk, who also owns Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter, told employees in April that he expects 1 million people will live on Mars in about 20 years, according to a New York Times investigation.
The Colorado crew
Poteet, the mission pilot, is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who spent 20 years in the service. He’s also a runner and triathlete who has completed 15 Ironmans.
“I’m kind of a driven person,” he said, hugely understating his explanation of how he is now, at 50 years old, going to space.
“I am not your typical astronaut. I tend to get motion sickness, and I had to overcome that flying fighter jets. I’m scared of heights. I’m a self-admitted terrible student.”
Poteet was inspired by the 1980s movies “Top Gun” and “The Right Stuff,” and remembers the first time he saw a performance of the Air Force’s Thunderbirds as a kid. But he was a mediocre student who got into the University of New Hampshire on a cross country scholarship, “kind of the only path for me to get into college,” he said. He got a degree in outdoor education, spending much of his time rock climbing, rafting and scuba diving.
Poteet also joined the ROTC program, which led to his career in the Air Force. He spent time in Colorado Springs early in his career, and moved back there in 2020 with his wife and three teenagers. They lived there until about two months ago, when the family moved back to New Hampshire because Poteet’s daughter is joining the running team at Northeastern University.
Poteet was a Thunderbird and served as commander of the 64th Aggressor Squadron. When he retired from the Air Force, he began working for Isaacman, whose companies included one hired by the Department of Defense to train fighter pilots for enemy combat. Poteet’s job was to play the part of a bad guy in an F-16 to help Air Force pilots react to various enemy scenarios.
As Isaacman moved into space exploration, Poteet joined him.
Poteet calculated that the space capsule will travel 69 times as fast as the F-16s he’s accustomed to flying. He will have far less control of the capsule compared to a fighter jet since the capsule is so automated, but there are similarities: “checklists, procedures, crew resource management, dealing with risky environments.”
Is he scared at all? “Definitely not,” Poteet said. The hardest part might have been telling his wife he was not actually going to act retired.
“I’m excited for every phase of this mission from launch, sitting on top of that rocket at zero miles an hour, and then a few minutes later, you’re going 17,500 miles an hour,” he said. “And you go from these g-forces that are pressing on your body to feeling that sensation of floating at zero g, all within a couple minutes. It’s going to be quite a thrill.”
Gillis, 30, oversees the SpaceX astronaut training program. She grew up in Boulder, where she attended the Shining Mountain Waldorf School and planned to become a professional violinist. Then she met former NASA astronaut Joseph R. Tanner, who persuaded her to study aerospace engineering at CU.
She was a “little girl that grew up looking at the stars,” but never imagined she would go to space, she said.
“I don’t think I could have imagined an adventure this big,” she said. “I certainly didn’t know it was a possibility, or that I could end up here someday. It was always so improbable to go to space that it wasn’t something I really seriously considered.”
In 2015, Gillis was hired as an intern at SpaceX, where they were designing the interior of the Dragon capsule. She is now in charge of training the team, which involves “causing chaos.” While the crew is in the simulator, she throws problems at them.
“You have a fire that starts in the spacecraft for some reason, and that requires the crew to immediately don their breathing masks and start figuring out the location of the fire,” she said, describing one of her training scenarios. “They’ll go through the whole procedure. Get into masks, transition to their spacesuits, fight the fire. And then figure out what are the implications for how to either continue the mission if the atmosphere is clean enough, or if they need to come home early.”
Gillis previously developed the training for the crew of a 2021 mission funded by Isaacman, founder of the payment processing company Shift4. Isaacman took three people to space with him in a Dragon capsule in a mission called Inspiration4, the world’s first all-civilian trip into orbit.
“I am personally so excited,” said Gillis, whose husband is a SpaceX engineer who worked on the Dragon capsule’s expulsion system. “I have utmost faith in the team and what they are doing at SpaceX.”
The families of the space travelers, she said, “really have the hardest job of staying on the ground.”
The research experiments
The crew is supposed to spend up to five days in orbit, and in between completing the first-ever private spacewalk, complete nearly 40 science experiments.
A handful of those experiments involve trying to better understand why astronauts suffer from vision problems, called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It’s believed the issue is caused by increased pressure in the brain and swelling of the optic nerve.
An experiment in conjunction with CU Boulder will look at how the absence of gravity could cause more fluid to go to the head. The crew will wear “smart” contact lenses with tiny micro-sensors that continuously measure their eyes.
“If you get to Mars, and by the time you get there, you’re unable to see, that’s a really big issue,” Gillis said.
In another experiment, Poteet and Menon will wear endoscopic cameras that will go down their noses and take images of their airways before space travel, while in space, and after their return. The point is to find out how space travel affects a person’s airway so that crews could effectively intubate a space traveler if necessary.
Several of the experiments, including one involving glucose monitoring, center on a future when “regular people” with health problems go to space.
“In the NASA selection process for an astronaut, you need to be at the peak of the pyramid of health, intelligence, all that, the requirements to become an astronaut,” Poteet said. “Once we open up the floodgates and make space accessible to everyone, we’ve got to be able to manage some of those health concerns that will come up. Basic things like diabetes.”
As for the spacewalk, the crew will attempt the “first-ever commercial extravehicular activity” at 700 kilometers above the Earth while wearing SpaceX-designed spacesuits. “Building a base on the moon and a city on Mars will require thousands of spacesuits,” according to the mission’s website.
When the crew will actually get to launch from Florida into space is uncertain, especially after the failure of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket July 11. The rocket was supposed to deploy 20 Starlink internet satellites, but could not do so because of a liquid oxygen leak, SpaceX said.The Polaris Dawn crew is continuing to train as they await a launch date. The mission website says it will launch “no earlier than July 31.”