Evolution: Hiring our First Full-Time Teammate Thanks to "Buy One, Give One."

In 2021, the field of human spaceflight changed enormously. With only a few exceptions, the 581 humans who had reached space prior to this year were sent there as government employees selected for government-funded missions. But this year saw a transformation of the field, with private missions carrying humans to space on four different vehicles from four different spaceports.

With transformation comes new traditions and new opportunities, and this year has seen plenty of those. Encouragingly, we’ve seen many of these missions used for the benefit of worthy individuals and worthy causes, flying aerospace legends on long-awaited missions and raising hundreds of millions of dollars for charity.  

Aerospace industry leader Dylan Taylor, one of the astronauts who flew to space on this past weekend’s NS-19 mission, saw an opportunity to build on that trend and to codify a new tradition for commercial human spaceflight. To make that happen, he’s leading by example. In his own words:  

I want to announce a set of gifts that I would ask all other commercial astronauts to consider. I call it buy one, give one, a term I first heard coined by my friends Ami Dror and Navyn Salem. It is simple, donate to worthy causes here on Earth the equivalent of the ticket price for the spaceflight. Commercial Astronauts are predicted to spend several hundred million dollars in the next five years. The impact that cohort could have here on Earth if they all supported this initiative could be very substantial.

Dylan and his family have chosen five organizations (in addition to Space for Humanity, which Dylan founded) to receive those gifts; and to our great delight, he included both the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship among them! 

Our two Fellowships have been talking with Dylan about how this gift can have the largest impact. We are delighted to announce today that Dylan and his wife are endowing a position for the first ever full-time employee at our Fellowships, covering the full cost of a fair salary and benefits package for a leader who can help us take these programs to the next level.

From the start, both the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship have been all volunteer, unpaid labors of love. We’ve benefited enormously from the creativity and efforts of an incredible group of people who wanted to honor the memories of Brooke and Patti, to help our industry improve upon its poor track record of diversity and inclusion, and to help advance the careers of incredible Black, female, and non-binary students. Both programs have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Precisely because of that success, and because of the huge communities of talented students and purpose-driven employers we now serve, we’ve got huge room for further growth -- but have lacked the bandwidth to take advantage of that opportunity.

Thanks to Dylan and Gabrielle Taylor and their gift, we can now add to our teams a highly intelligent, highly motivated new leader, who will work closely with our executive teams both to run our current Fellowships and to help us develop and execute plans for new things. We’re brimming over with ideas; and now, we’ll have what we need to turn those ideas into reality.

We’re hard at work on the job description now, aiming to post that early in the near year. As you can imagine given the nature and track record of our industry, we’re working to design a holistic, human, and thorough recruiting and selection process to help us get the best human for the job -- someone who will truly help us and who will truly benefit from this opportunity as well. Want to be the first to hear when our job posting goes live? Sign up here for updates! 

Alvin, Caroline, Diana, Emily, Kayla, Khristian, Tiffany, and Will