The SpaceX Polaris Dawn Mission Start on On August 26, the probe will come closer to the moon than it has in over 50 years. And Granite Stater Scott “Kidd” Poteet will be on board.
“We’re also flying higher than anyone has since Apollo 17 in 1972,” Poteet said. (The expedition is scheduled to fly within 1,000 kilometers of the International Space Station.)
Poteet, the expedition’s mission pilot, is currently undergoing a 10-day quarantine before launch next week. He grew up in Durham and graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1996, where he participated in the university’s ROTC program. He is now retired from the U.S. Air Force after two decades of service.
He will travel with three other crew members, billionaire Jared Issacman and SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. Isaacman funded the Polaris program and has previously been on self-funded space missions.
During their five-day stay in space, the crew plans to complete the first commercial spacewalk, test SpaceX’s Starlink communications system and conduct over 40 experiments to better understand the effects of space travel on astronauts.
Poteet said the trip should help lay the groundwork for future long-distance spaceflights. He compared the Polaris Dawn mission to NASA’s Gemini mission, which bridged the gap between the Mercury mission’s first spaceflight and the Apollo mission’s moon landings.
“They had to overcome many challenges along the way, such as how do we do a spacewalk? How do we dock vehicles with multiple crew members in space for extended periods of time?” he said. “We developed this development program in a similar way.”
For one of these experiments, Poteet will use a tiny camera on a tube to take photos of his airways to better understand the effects of space on astronauts’ respiratory systems.
“We take pictures before the flight, then during the flight and then after the flight,” he said. “We see how the diameter of the airways changes.”
Poteet and his crew have spent the last two and a half years training for this mission. He said they spent a lot of time “getting comfortable with uncomfortable scenarios.” The crew trained in simulators at SpaceX headquarters, learning their spacecraft’s hardware and software, climbing mountains, flying fighter jets and doing skydives.
“The ups and downs you experience with these things are very similar to the way we live and work in space,” Poteet said.
