Sarah Gillis

Sarah Gillis is an American engineer and astronaut who is scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private space mission. If the trip goes ahead as planned in 2023, she will become the youngest American to reach orbit.

Gillis is a Sr. Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX, where she is responsible for supervising the astronaut training program for the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. This includes developing a mission-specific program and executing the training for NASA and commercial astronauts who fly on the Dragon spacecraft. She prepared the NASA astronauts for the first Demo-2 and Crew-1 missions and more recently directly trained the Inspiration4 astronauts, the first all-civilian crew to go into orbit.

Gillis is also a trained 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.

Gillis is scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private spaceflight funded by Jared Isaacman. The mission will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will spend four days in orbit, during which time they will conduct a number of science experiments and raise awareness of climate change.

Gillis is a role model for women and girls who are interested in STEM fields and space exploration. She is also a reminder that anything is possible if you set your mind to it.