Highest altitude reached by a woman

The highest altitude reached by a woman is 1,400.7 km (870.35 mi), achieved by Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis (both USA) on 11 September 2024. Menon and Gillis, both SpaceX engineers, were part of the crew of the private Polaris Dawn mission, along with Jared Isaacman and Scott Poteet. Their spacecraft, Crew Dragon Resilience, was boosted to an eliptical orbit with an apogee (highest point) of 1,400.7 km and a perigee (lowest point) of around 196 km (121.8 mi) at 00:20 (all times UTC). It remained in this orbit until 10:30 the same day.

Anna Menon (née Wilhelm) is a biomedical engineer from Houston, Texas. She worked as a biomedical flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center for seven years, monitoring and assisting the crew of the International Space Station. In 2018, she joined SpaceX as part of the team that developed the company's procedures and protocols for crewed missions. Jared Isaacman, who had worked closely with Menon during his earlier Inspiration4 mission, invited her to join the crew for the Polaris Dawn mission in late 2021. She joined the crew at around the same time that her husband, flight surgeon Anil Menon, was selected to join the NASA astronaut corps.

Sarah Gillis is an aerospace engineer from Boulder, Colorado. In 2015, when she was completing her degree, she was encouraged to do an internship at SpaceX by her academic mentor, former NASA astronaut Joseph Tanner. After joining the company full time, she worked on the development of the Dragon spacecraft before moving over to the astronaut training program for the Crew Dragon. Like her crewmate Anna Menon, Gillis was closely involved in the training and flight operations for Isaacman's 2021 Inspiration4 mission, and was asked to join the follow up flight in late 2021. Gillis is a classically trained violinist who performed for a livestream during the flight.

The flight broke a record that had stood since Gemini XI, which reached an altitude of 1,368.9 km (850.6 mi) on 14 September 1966 with NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon on board.