Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon thought they were attending routine meetings in 2021 at SpaceX when they were invited to become part of the crew for what would become the record-setting Polaris Dawn space mission.

Gillis said both women had separate meetings with billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman, who has been nominated to become NASA administrator by President Donald Trump, where they expected to discuss his return to space and the documentary he wanted to make about the trip. He instead asked them to join him on the four-person crew on the nearly five-day mission in September 2024.

The mission, designed to test the effects of space radiation and spaceflight on the human body, broke the record set by the Gemini 11 mission in 1966 for the highest orbit above Earth at 875 miles and the crew performed the first commercial spacewalk. The two women flew farther from Earth than any other female astronaut and Gillis, then 30, became the youngest person to participate in a spacewalk.

“I was floored, shocked and flattered (by the invitation) and asked for the weekend for talk to my family” before she accepted, Menon said during a Tuesday night panel discussion at this week’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The Space Foundation honored the crew before the discussion with its John L. “Jack” Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration, named for the Apollo 13 crew member and former Colorado congressman who died in 1982.

Gillis remembered trying to tell her husband, a SpaceX engineer, while he was in an online meeting and he told her he would be available in a few hours; she insisted on telling him immediately and “every single emotion crossed his face.”

Gillis and Menon had both been senior space operations engineers for the Elon Musk-owned company, with Gillis also leading crew training and Menon serving as mission director. Neither Isaacman, who had a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, or Scott Poteet, who was the pilot for the mission, were able to attend the ceremony or discussion that also featured Todd Ericson, mission director for the Polaris program.

Menon said she accepted the invitation because she “believes in space exploration and it has been my passion for my whole life because of the tremendous good it can do on Earth. I was inspired by the ambitious objective of the mission.”

Gillis said she wanted to be part of an “incredible endeavor to explore the final frontier, of which we have only barely scratched the surface, and take meaningful steps toward space exploration and living in space.”

After two years of training and delays from spacesuit development and communications links as well as a launch failure of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the crew arrived in Florida for the launch and waited nearly three weeks until liftoff, in part due to a hurricane. As she waited for the launch, Menon said she could picture herself making the same decisions about whether to delay liftoff for weather.

“Every single human spaceflight is extraordinary – there is nothing ordinary about going into space,” Gillis said. “We stand on the shoulders of giants who brought all the knowledge to this spacecraft and this mission.”

Gillis, who grew up in Boulder, also became the first astronaut to play a violin in space, selecting “Rey’s Theme” from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” because the movie character Rey “inspired so many girls.” Gillis had played the violin since childhood and was joined in the performance by young musicians around the world through a Starlink laser connection to the capsule.

When the capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, Menon said she remembers having “gratitude for life. I felt a whole warmth pass over me as we passed through the atmosphere and an appreciation for what a beautiful life I’ve had.”

Both Gillis and Menon have remained with SpaceX, though in different roles, while Isaacman will likely become NASA administrator, and Ericson has become a senior adviser to the administrator.