Polaris Dawn Mission Pilot, Space Makes You Think of Montana

Wow. What a conversation with Polaris Dawn Mission Pilot Kidd Poteet. We talked about their splash landing as they made it back from space. We talked about the historic space walk itself. And, we talked about how they trained for the space mission right here in Montana.

Here's some excerpts of our conversation with the full audio below. 

Flint: "Describe the training you did in the Montana airspace and how that prepared you for the successful mission."

Kidd Poteet: "Absolutely. So we spent about the last two and a half years preparing for this space flight. It's a very focused developmental mission where we had four primary objectives. We wanted to complete the first ever commercial spacewalk. We wanted to go higher than anyone has been since Apollo 17 in 1972 with regard to Earth orbit altitude. We wanted to test Starlink laser based communication for the very first time from space. And then lastly, we wanted to accomplish about 40 science and research experiments. So the fact that we had to dedicate the last two and a half years to training for this, we go through a very rigorous syllabus, and that includes flying fighter jets. You know, I come from an Air Force background. I flew F-16's for 20 years all over the world, and Jared (Isaacman) has an aviation background as well on the civilian side- he's an overachiever and very successful individual, so he kind of worked up the ranks in the civilian aviation world from basic single engine aircraft all the way through fighter jets. So he's got a hangar right there in Bozeman, where we house a fleet of fighter jets, and we use those for training purposes. You know, working in the aviation environment and flying in close proximity to each other in formations, and we can exercise some of the things that we do in space to include checklist procedures, building trust as a team, kind of getting the other crew members comfortable in uncomfortable scenarios with all the restrictive gear that we fly with and working in three dimensions. So it's very applicable to what we experienced in orbit, and we continue to train that way to this day."

Flint: "What did you think of being in space, just looking out across it? Because, you know, it seems like we take a lot of this for granted, because we've seen so much of it in movies. We've seen a lot of the NASA videos, but just how incredible is it to truly, to look out upon the earth?"

Kidd Poteet: "It's absolutely mesmerizing. There is such an amazing glow to our planet and it's perfection from looking down from 1,400 kilometers. It's the highest anyone's been in over 50 years. And to see just the lights alone from the planet...the dawn, the sun rises and the sun sets. We saw em every 106 minutes. My favorite was probably the sunrise. It would start off with this just blue sliver along the horizon, and you would start to see the rays of the sun pop out, and then all of a sudden the sun would crest and it would light up the entire planet in our capsule, and it was just blinding light. It's absolutely amazing. It's really hard to articulate and describe how beautiful it is, but it is life changing. And it changes your perspective on on how you view the Earth and this planet, and you crave it. You know, it's ironic, because you're up there, you're concealed to this tin can, you're in this capsule. You can't smell nature, you can't feel it, you can't feel the weather, the breeze, but you crave it because you just see this beauty. It's something I definitely wanted to get back into, you know, Montana is absolutely gorgeous. I can't wait to get back to Montana and just explore nature."

Full audio of our chat with Kidd Poteet: