Two Coloradans join first-ever commercial spacewalk to research ways for people to live on Mars

Scott “Kid” Poteet grew up in the 1980s watching the original “Top Gun” and spent a career flying fighter jets at Mach 2 — which is a fraction of the speed of the capsule that he’s scheduled to pilot into space this summer. 

Sarah Gillis was a classically trained violinist headed for a music career when she met a NASA astronaut who encouraged her to pivot and become an engineer. Now she trains astronauts and is set to travel with them 1,400 kilometers above the Earth.

Poteet and Gillis are half of the four-person crew of Polaris Dawn, a private space mission funded by billionaire space-tourism entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and scheduled to launch as soon as Aug. 1. Poteet is a retired U.S. Air Force pilot who until recently lived in Colorado Springs, and Gillis is a Boulder native and 2017 graduate of the University of Colorado.

The crew, flying in a SpaceX capsule called the Dragon, will attempt to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown and try the first-ever commercial spacewalk. 

Their mission could face further delays after the failure to launch this month of the SpaceX rocket, the Falcon 9, that is supposed to send the Polaris Dawn capsule into space. The goal is to understand more about how long-duration space Travel will affect human Health and is considered by SpaceX as another step toward making it possible for regular people, who aren’t trained astronauts, to live on the moon or Mars. 

“If we have goals of colonizing the moon and Mars and building these communities, it’s going to need engineers, it’s going to need medical professionals, anything and everything you can think of to build a community,” Poteet said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “You’re going to need to be able to create these environments on these planets in the future.”

The Polaris Dawn mission is one of several information-gathering trips needed before the future Travel of SpaceX’s mega-rocket, Starship. The company says Starship will someday take up to 100 passengers on trips to Mars. For now, though, Starship has been hired to take NASA astronauts to the moon. 

The space flight that will include Poteet and Gillis, along with medical officer Anna Menon and mission commander Isaacman, is the first of three planned Polaris missions. The crew plans to help conduct 38 experiments about human health in space, including some in conjunction with CU Boulder. 

It will also test laser-based communications for Starlink, the satellite internet constellation that provides broadband internet to users around the world. Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, and both companies are owned by Elon Musk. 

Musk, who also owns Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter, told employees in April that he expects 1 million people will live on Mars in about 20 years, according to a New York Times investigation.

The Colorado crew

Poteet, the mission pilot, is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who spent 20 years in the service. He’s also a runner and triathlete who has completed 15 Ironmans. 

“I’m kind of a driven person,” he said, hugely understating his explanation of how he is now, at 50 years old, going to space. 

“I am not your typical astronaut. I tend to get motion sickness, and I had to overcome that flying fighter jets. I’m scared of heights. I’m a self-admitted terrible student.” 

Poteet was inspired by the 1980s movies “Top Gun” and “The Right Stuff,” and remembers the first time he saw a performance of the Air Force’s Thunderbirds as a kid. But he was a mediocre student who got into the University of New Hampshire on a cross country scholarship, “kind of the only path for me to get into college,” he said. He got a degree in outdoor education, spending much of his time rock climbing, rafting and scuba diving. 

Poteet also joined the ROTC program, which led to his career in the Air Force. He spent time in Colorado Springs early in his career, and moved back there in 2020 with his wife and three teenagers. They lived there until about two months ago, when the family moved back to New Hampshire because Poteet’s daughter is joining the running team at Northeastern University.

Poteet was a Thunderbird and served as commander of the 64^th Aggressor Squadron. When he retired from the Air Force, he began working for Isaacman, whose companies included one hired by the Department of Defense to train fighter pilots for enemy combat. Poteet’s job was to play the part of a bad guy in an F-16 to help Air Force pilots react to various enemy scenarios. 

As Isaacman moved into space exploration, Poteet joined him. 

Poteet calculated that the space capsule will Travel 69 times as fast as the F-16s he’s accustomed to flying. He will have far less control of the capsule compared to a fighter jet since the capsule is so automated, but there are similarities: “checklists, procedures, crew resource management, dealing with risky environments.”

Is he scared at all? “Definitely not,” Poteet said. The hardest part might have been telling his wife he was not actually going to act retired.