Inspiration

I've been feeling called and motivated to do everything, and I wish I could identify where the beginning was. The truth is that every action ever performed was the result of every moment before it, so to explain why I decided to begin a nonprofit or why I'm journaling publicly today feels like a futile endeavor.

My objective had been my career since starting college in 2015, though then I really thought I would work with high energy gamma ray blazars at Goddard Spaceflight center for the majority of my life. It's now seeming likely that Goddard closes down completely.

In 2019, I learned that flying satellites was a job that people do when I found myself doing orbital mechanics (what my dad calls "space math") in a control room - working night shifts and holidays because satellites don't stop flying. That company filed for bankruptcy, giving me the opportunity to fly satellites in Colorado (a place I'd wanted to live since visiting a few years prior). My new non-bankrupted company had originally intended to operate NASA's Lunar Gateway from their control room, letting me know that flying interplanetary spacecraft was a job somebody could have. This became my objective for the next 5 years as I completed a master's degree in space resources and joined a company that did higher stakes space operations. Interviewing to operate James Webb Space Telescope and a commercial lunar rover showed me that I was qualified for my dreams, even if I hadn't crossed the threshold. In 2025, I rejected an opportunity that would have put me closer to these dreams, letting me know that my objective had changed.

I then began searching for the intersection of what I love to do, what I'm good at, and what the world needs; 3/4 of the Japanese concept, "ikigai".