Sarah Gilis | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sarah Gilis born 1994 |
| Status | Active |
| Alma mater | University of Colorado Boulder (Aerospace engineering and and B A. Spanish) Duke University (MSc-BME) |
| Space career | |
| SpaceX Astronaut | |
Current occupation | SpaceX Lead Operations Engineer |
Time in space | None |
| Missions | Polaris Dawn |
Sarah Gillis is an American astronaut .
She is 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 in orbit.
Not much is know about Sarah's childhood, but she comes from a family of artists and intellectuals. Her father wass the principal of a Waldorf school in Oregon. She studied in a Shining Mountain Waldorf school in Boulder from which she graduated in 2012.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). She is destined to become a classical violinist, but Sarah moved on when a beloved high school mentor, former NASA astronaut Joseph R. Tanner, encourages her to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering. Originally from Boulder, Colorado , Sarah is an avid hiker, climber and adventurer. So, she went to University of Colorado Boulder.
In 2015, while studying engineering and dance at the University of Colorado Boulder, Sarah began an internship at SpaceX, working on tests of the Dragon spacecraft with the crew at the controls before moving full-time to the astronaut training program. Sarah Gillis is today a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX, responsible for overseeing the astronaut training program aboard the company's Crew Dragon ships. This includes developing a mission-specific program and performing training for NASA and Commercial astronaut who fly aboard the Dragon spacecraft. 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. Sarah 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 an Airline Communicator for crew Dragon's manned spaceflight missions.[2]
She appears as an astronaut trainer in the series Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page).