Sarah Gillis
Sarah Levine "Cooper" Gillis is an American engineer who was employed by SpaceX as the senior space operations engineer and then by NASA as a senior advisor. She flew to space in September 2024 on Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, operated by SpaceX on behalf of Jared Isaacman. During the mission, she completed the first commercial spacewalk with Isaacman, becoming the youngest person to date to participate in a spacewalk, and, along with Anna Menon, set a new record for women traveling farthest from Earth.
Early life and education
Gillis graduated from Shining Mountain Waldorf School in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2012. She obtained a BS degree in aerospace engineering from University of Colorado Boulder in 2017, this on the advice of her mentor, former NASA astronaut Joseph R. Tanner.Career
SpaceX
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 for crew Dragon missions, the SpaceX equivalent of the NASA CAPCOM role.