University of Colorado Boulder alum Sarah Gillis returned to Boulder on Monday after a space mission where she participated in the first-ever commercial spacewalk and became the first person to play a violin in space.

Gillis, who grew up in Boulder, graduated from CU Boulder in 2017 as an aerospace engineer. She became an astronaut seven years after graduating from CU Boulder and is the university’s 21st astronaut. In September, she was a mission specialist on a four-person crew on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission.

“It was extremely cool to see the years of hard work across the team come together,” Gillis said. “It’s been an extraordinary effort by the entire SpaceX team to make that possible.”

She returned to CU Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium on Monday to speak about the mission and share photos and videos from it. Students were eager to shake her hand and pose for a photo. Attendees formed a line to the back of the planetarium after she spoke, patiently waiting for their chance to meet her.

Like Gillis, CU Boulder student Ethan Frick hopes to go to space someday. He was excited to hear from someone who is part of the next generation of space explorers.

“We’re only at the beginning, I would say,” Frick said. “We are part of a new generation of space exploration and I’m excited to be a student at the forefront of that, to be able to contribute to that as someone who is going to be in this career in the future.”

CU Boulder student Josh Cole followed the Polaris mission closely while it was in space.

“This is a huge milestone,” Cole said. “Polaris Dawn is a pretty substantial milestone in human spaceflight, and so to have the opportunity to hear directly from someone who got to partake in that is really special.”

Cole especially enjoyed how Gillis explained in detail what it was like to be in space. She described how the takeoff felt like her face was being pulled into the seat, and how in space she could feel the fluid redistributing in her legs due to the lack of gravity. She explained how during reentry she could see a glow around the spacecraft which turned into pinks and oranges that then led to turbulence.

And, she described what it was like to be on a spacewalk.

“I exited the spacecraft in darkness. Through the visor I could see, if I really looked, I could see this blue horizon, the limb of the Earth, but it was a lot of darkness,” Gillis said, adding, “It was pretty extraordinary.”

Gillis will also visit Shining Mountain Waldorf School this week to meet with students from where she was a 2012 graduate. When Gillis was a student there, her classmates voted her “most likely to walk on the sun.”

The five-day Polaris Dawn mission departed on Sept 10 and returned on Sept 15. The mission objectives were to reach a high altitude, complete the first commercial spacewalk, test a new communications system and conduct research experiments.

The spacecraft reached an orbit of nearly 875 miles above Earth, the farthest humans have gone since Apollo 17 in 1972, which was the last time humans landed on the moon. They completed the first commercial spacewalk and tested specially designed suits. The team collected data for about 36 research experiments, including experiments on human motion sickness, vision degradation and bodily airways in space.

The Polaris Dawn team also tested Starlink, a laser-based communications system, in space. It was highly successful, and as part of the test, Gillis played the first violin in space in collaboration with orchestras from around the world. The video has 187,000 views on YouTube and was a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Music has always been a big part of her life. Gillis was raised to be a musician, and her mom was a professional violinist. It meant a lot to her to have music and science unite to reach a worldwide audience.

“We were able to create kind of this global music moment,” she said.

Gillis said it was great to return to CU Boulder to talk about the mission.

“It’s really fun to get to come back and share the story with the community here. Boulder is my hometown, I grew up here, I love this city, I obviously went to school here even,” Gillis said. “And getting to come back and say thank you to the communities that helped raise me, the professors that helped support me during this journey is extremely touching.”

For more information on the mission, visit polarisprogram.com/dawn.