Sarah Gillis | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sarah Levine 1994 (age 29–30) |
| Status | Active |
| Alma mater | University of Colorado Boulder (Aerospace engineering) |
| Space career | |
| SpaceX Astronaut | |
Current occupation | SpaceX Lead Operations Engineer |
Time in space | None |
| Missions | Polaris Dawn |
Sarah Gillis is an American engineer. She has been selected for the Polaris Dawn mission, in which she will be mission specialist.[1] If the mission goes ahead as planned in late 2022, she will become the youngest American to reach orbit.
In 2015, while studying engineering and dance 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. 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.[2]
Gillis has been selected as a Mission Specialist on the Polaris Dawn mission, commanded by Jared Isaacman.[3]
She appears as an astronaut trainer in the series Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space.[4]
