The SpaceX Polaris Dawn Mission launching on Aug. 26 will get closer to the moon than any manned spacecraft has in more than 50 years. And Granite Stater Scott “Kidd” Poteet will be onboard.
“We’re also going higher than anyone has gone since Apollo 17, 1972,” Poteet said. (The expedition is set to travel 1,000 kilometers past the International Space Station.)
Poteet, the expedition’s mission pilot, is currently in the midst of a 10 day quarantine before next week’s launch. 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 alongside three other crew members, billionaire Jared Issacman and SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. Isaacman paid for the Polaris program and has previously traveled to space on earlier self-funded missions.
Over the course of their five days in space, the crew plans to complete the first commercial space walk, test SpaceX’s Starlink communication system, and conduct more than 40 experiments to better understand the effects of space travel on astronauts.
Poteet said the trip is meant to help lay the groundwork for future long-haul space travel. He compared the Polaris Dawn mission to the NASA Gemini mission, which bridged the gap between the Mercury mission’s initial spaceflight and the Apollo mission’s lunar landings.
“They had to figure out a lot of challenges in the middle with how do we do a spacewalk? How do we dock vehicles in space multi-crew longer durations?,” he said. “So in a similar fashion, we came up with this developmental program.”
For one of those experiments, Poteet will take photos of his airway using a tiny camera on a tube to better understand how outer space impacts astronauts' airways.
“We're taking images before flight and then during the flight and then post flight,” he said. “We're seeing how the diameter of the airway changes.”
Poteet and his crew have spent the past two and half years training for this mission. He said they spent a lot of time getting “comfortable in uncomfortable scenarios.” The crew trained in simulators at SpaceX headquarters, learned the hardware and software of their spacecraft, climbed mountains, flew fighter jets, and skydived.
“The highs and lows that you experience doing those things is very similar to how we'll live and operate in space,” Poteet said.
