Joe Skipper/Reuters
SpaceX just launched four people on its most daring human spaceflight yet, a mission called Polaris Dawn.
The crew features a billionaire, a pilot, and two SpaceX employees. After an early morning launch on Tuesday, they're floating in the company's Crew Dragon spaceship in Earth's orbit.
None of them are NASA-grade professional astronauts, but they're scheduled to fly further from Earth than anyone has traveled in over 50 years, since the Apollo missions.
They're also planning to conduct the first-ever commercial spacewalk, taking the risk of opening their entire Crew Dragon spaceship to the vacuum of space.
Here's who's on board this bold, historic mission.
SpaceX/Business Wire via AP Photo
Jared Isaacman is the billionaire bankrolling the mission and serving as its commander. This isn't the 41-year-old's first rodeo.
In 2021, he funded and flew on the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight, called Inspiration4, and brought three people with him to circle Earth aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
That mission's name, Inspiration4, derives from Shift4, the payment-processing company that Isaacman founded at age 16 in his parents' basement after dropping out of high school. He is still the CEO.
Compared to other space-faring billionaires — like the flashy Richard Branson and champagne-spraying Jeff Bezos — Isaacman's tone is much more serious.
For starters, he's a relatively private person. He's repeatedly declined to say how much money he's spent on his missions with SpaceX.
He also has some technical qualifications for the commercial astronaut gig: He's an accomplished pilot, reporting over 7,000 flight hours. Isaacman's business repertoire also includes Draken International, a private aircraft provider and pilot-training company that he founded in 2012 and sold to Blackdstone in 2019. The sale, along with taking Shift4 public, made him a billionaire.
Messaging around both Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn has been heavily focused on fundraising for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as well as making technological advancements in human spaceflight.
"I just knew it was a pretty significant moment in history, and it comes with some responsibility," Isaacman told BI ahead of the Inspiration4 launch in 2021. He said the St. Jude fundraising was an effort to "take care of some of the problems that we have here on Earth, so we earn the right to go and explore among the stars."
Isaacman has also approached NASA, offering to fund a Crew Dragon mission to boost the Hubble Space Telescope's orbit and therefore extend its lifespan, since it's currently expected to fall from orbit in the mid-2030s. NASA has declined the offer for now.
Isaacman lives in New Jersey with his wife, Monica Isaacman, and their two daughters, according to the New York Post.
Polaris Program / John Kraus
As the engineer overseeing SpaceX's astronaut training program, Sarah Gillis first got to know Isaacman when she was preparing him and his crewmates for the Inspiration4 flight.
"You spend a huge amount of your job pretending to be an astronaut and thinking through what they would care about," Gillis, aged 30, said in a briefing on August 19. "I cannot wait to actually test this in space and bring back knowledge to the engineers."
Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, Gillis was on track to be a violinist like her mother until her junior year of high school, when she attended a university guest lecture by Joe Tanner, a former NASA astronaut and a mechanical engineering professor. She told The Denver Post that she stayed to talk with Tanner, who became her mentor as she pursued aerospace engineering.
Gillis started with an internship at SpaceX in 2015 and quickly ascended through the ranks of the company's astronaut training program and mission control operations. She's still a skilled violinist and an avid hiker.
Gillis's husband, Lewis, is also a SpaceX engineer. He helped build Dragon's propulsion system.
"So I know exactly what goes into the testing and the design and the rigor behind absolutely everything in the spacecraft," Gillis said, adding that she was "very, very excited to fly on my favorite Dragon spacecraft."
She's serving as the mission specialist on Polaris Dawn, assigned to leave Dragon on Thursday to conduct the first commercial spacewalk alongside Isaacman. This is her first time in space.
Joe Skipper/Reuters
Anna Menon has dreamed of going to space since she was a child.
"I grew up in Houston, another Space City, and I was exposed to space on a field trip and got to experience a day in the life of an astronaut and a flight controller in mission control," Menon said during the August 19 briefing. "And I fell in love with the industry."
Polaris Dawn is the 38-year-old's first time in space. She's an engineer at SpaceX and is serving as a mission specialist and medical officer for Polaris Dawn.
"I think working at SpaceX gives me a tremendous amount of competence going to space," Menon said.
Before joining SpaceX, Menon worked at NASA and helped oversee International Space Station operations as a biomedical flight controller.
She's not the only one in her family headed to space. Menon's husband, Anil, is one of NASA's new astronauts. The couple have two children, James and Grace.
During her trip in space, Anna plans to get in a bit of reading. "I'm going to read a children's book I wrote, 'Kisses from Space,' to both my kids as well as some of the brave kids at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital," she told People. The live feed storytime is part of the mission's fundraising for the pediatric hospital, which treats childhood cancers and other diseases.
Joe Skipper/Reuters
Though he's flown fighter jets for the US Air Force, Scott Poteet has never been to space. The 50-year-old mission pilot suffers from motion sickness, but managed to overcome that in his combat missions and performing aerobatic maneuvers with the US Air Force's Thunderbirds.
Poteet told Spectrum News his route to becoming an astronaut wasn't typical, at least not by today's standards. His grades weren't the best in school, and he doesn't have a background in engineering or science. Nevertheless, Isaacman invited Poteet, who goes by "Kidd," to pilot Polaris Dawn.
"On a personal level, flying fighter jets in the Air Force for 20 years, combat experience, operational test experience, leading many red flag exercises, and fighter weapons school, I can tell you without a doubt this has been some of the most challenging training that I've ever experienced," Poteet said about his training for Polaris Dawn during the briefing on August 19.
Poteet lives in Monument, Colorado with his wife and has three children. At least one hopes to follow in his footsteps. "My 12-year-old son absolutely plans to go to space," he recently told UNH Magazine. "He believes it will be commonplace in his lifetime."
