On any given night at Anna Menon's home in Houston, the 38-year-old mother and her son James, 6, act out a ritual that combines Menon's passion for space with her parental need to get her oldest child to sleep. "James came up with it," she says. "He asks me to rocket him into his bed, so I basically grab hold of his legs, and we do this countdown: 10,9,8... Then we blast off as I push him up to his top bunk before I hug him goodnight."
In the coming weeks James-along with his 3-year-old sister Grace and their dad, Anil, 47will watch Menon, a SpaceX mission specialist and medical officer, perform a grown-up version of their nightly pastime. She will be blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with three other crew members Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet and Sarah Gillis-on the Polaris Dawn, a trailblazing private space mission that is set to fly deeper into the cosmos (870 miles, to be exact) than any other since the Gemini 11 took off in 1966. "This is a stepping stone," says Menon. "It's helping to build technologies that will get humans closer to Mars and beyond."
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