Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Founder Astronaut, Virgin Galactic

214: WITIstyle Talk: What is Your Mission? Fulfilling What You Came to Earth to Do

Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides has over five hours of weightless time in a 727 aircraft as a Flight Director for Zero-G Corporation. She and her husband George T. Whitesides are also Founder Astronauts slated to be among the first to take a sub-orbital spaceflight on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. Trained as an astrobiologist at Stanford and Caltech, Ms. Whitesides has been to the Canadian Arctic to study plant life in extreme environments and to the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean with "Titanic" director James Cameron to film a 3D IMAX documentary, "Aliens of the Deep." She has two children (aged 3 and 5) and continues her work in the space community training the next generation of leaders, blogging and speaking about space, and working on her book on the impact of human space exploration on societal evolution. Ms. Whitesides' passion is using space to inspire humanity with what is possible.