Meet Anna Menon, SpaceX engineer and crew member of Jared Isaacman's Polaris Programme
US pilot and businessman Jared Isaacman announced a unique space programme that would include SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, wife of Anil Menon.
- World News
- 2 min read
US pilot and businessman Jared Isaacman announced a unique space programme that would include SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, who is the wife of Indian origin physician Anil Menon. The program, titled Polaris Programme, is a first-of-its-kind attempt to develop human spaceflight capabilities while raising funding and awareness for vital causes on Earth.
Anna, who works as a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX, is one of the crew members. She oversees the development of crew operations and serves as a Mission Director and crew communicator in mission control. She is a seasoned member of Isaacman's team, which also include Scott Poteet and SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis.
Who is Anna Menon?
Anna has overseen the deployment of Dragon's crew capabilities, assisted in the creation of the crew communicator operator role, and created crucial operational solutions to vehicle crises such as fire or cabin depressurization throughout her time at SpaceX. Demo-2, Crew-1, CRS-22, and CRS-23 are just a few of the cargo and crew Dragon missions Anna worked on. She served as a biomedical flight controller for the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA for seven years before joining SpaceX. She is a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force, and she was chosen by NASA in December of last year along with nine other people to be astronauts for future missions.
She is married to Anil Menon and has a son James and a daughter Grace. Anil Menon was SpaceX's first flight surgeon, assisting in the launch of the company's first humans into space on NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission and helping to develop a medical organisation to support the human system on future missions. He previously worked for NASA as a crew flight surgeon on multiple voyages to the International Space Station with astronauts.
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About Polaris Programme
Three human spaceflights will be conducted under the Polaris Programme. Polaris Dawn is the name of the first mission, which will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the fourth quarter of 2022. Because the Polaris Dawn mission involves several first-time objectives, the Polaris Program selected a crew of professionals who are well familiar with one another.