Scott Poteet
American retired Air Force fighter pilot, former vice president at Shift4, and future private astronaut
Scott "Kidd" Poteet (born December 7, 1973) is an American retired pilot from the United States Air Force. He was the pilot of the Polaris Dawn mission in 2024, a privately funded human spaceflight operated by SpaceX for Jared Isaacman. Poteet lives in Stratham, NH.
Early life
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Outdoor education at the University of New Hampshire, and later attended the Air Command and Staff College, and earned a Master's degree in counseling and leadership from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs in a program jointly operated with the Air Force Academy.
Career
Poteet is a retired United States Air Force lieutenant colonel who served for 18 years in a variety of roles, including commanding officer of the 64th Aggressor Squadron, pilot in the USAF Thunderbirds (Position 4), test and evaluation pilot, and commercial pilot. Poteet has over 3,200 flight hours on the F-16, A-4, T-38, T-37, T-3 and Alpha Jet. He logged over 400 combat hours during Operations Northern Watch, Southern Watch, Joint Guardian, Freedom's Sentinel, and Resolute Support.
After retiring from the Air Force, Poteet worked as a director of business development at Draken International from 2016 to 2020 and then as the vice president of strategy at Shift4 from 2020 to 2022, under CEO Jared Isaacman. During his time at Shift4, Poteet also trained, and then served, as the mission director of Inspiration4, the first all-civilian human spaceflight mission led by Isaacman as commander.
In 2022, Poteet was selected to serve as the spacecraft pilot of the Polaris Dawn mission, which flew in September 2024. During the flight, Poteet was the backup to Isaacman, the mission commander, who successfully completed the first commercial spacewalk.
“Scott Poteet” enters the record as american retired Air Force fighter pilot, former vice president at Shift4, and future private astronaut. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scott, Poteet and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scott Poteet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.