| Sarah Gillis | |
| Birth Name: | Sarah Levine |
| Birth Date: | 1 January 1994[1] [2] |
| Birth Place: | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Senior Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX |
| Education: | University of Colorado Boulder (BS) |
| Type: | SpaceX Commercial Astronaut |
| Space Time: | 5 days (planned) |
| Missions: | Polaris Dawn |
Sarah Gillis is an American engineer employed by SpaceX as the senior space operations engineer. She is scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, operated by SpaceX on behalf of Jared Isaacman. During the mission, she is expected to attempt the first commercial spacewalk with Isaacman.
Gillis graduated from Shining Mountain Waldorf School in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2012. She obtained a degree in aerospace engineering from University of Colorado Boulder on the advice of her mentor, former NASA astronaut Joseph R. Tanner.[3]
In 2015, while 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.[4]
Gillis is scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private spaceflight funded by Jared Isaacman.[5] She will perform an extravehicular activity with Jared Isaacman.
Gillis appears in episodes 3, 4 and 5 in the 2021 Netflix series .