Find Your Heading

Welcome to Star Compass!

What’s inside this week:

🧑‍🚀 This Week’s Mission: Where to live is the most important career decision.

🌌 This Week in Space: Three tools to find your place and take care of it.

🚀 Ask a Rocket Scientist: How do you manage setbacks?

🔭 Next Step: What’s your next step before the semiquincentennial?

Last December, a graduating aerospace engineering student asked me to help her find her first job.

When we met for the first time in Boulder, she started rattling off companies she may want to work for. I stopped her before she could go any further.

"Before we talk about companies," I said, "tell me where you want to live."

She was surprised by the question.

Richard Florida spent his career studying how location shapes careers. He stated that “choosing a place to live is as important to our happiness as choosing a spouse or career.” His research found that geography determines your professional network, your access to opportunity, and the trajectory of your career.

Many aerospace professionals get this backwards. They chase individual job listings, research the companies after finding a few jobs that sound interesting, and then think about whether they could live in the job location.

I made this same mistake when I looked for my first job, too.

My experience has taught me you should determine your “where” first. Then, research companies you would want to work for in locations that interest you. Finally, you uncover the jobs that fit what you offer (some jobs where you are the best fit are not even listed).

We will tackle the first step in this issue, with the other steps covered in future newsletters.

Where you live is not a lifestyle decision that follows your career decision. It is a career decision that comes first.

With the pandemic, the option for remote work expanded, even as recent return-to-the-office mandates shrink it again. Shouldn’t the possibility of this option allow you to work anywhere?

The answer is yes and no.

Certain aerospace work offers this flexibility. But if you are going to work directly on hardware, you must be where the hardware is being built and launched.

Melody Warnick has written two great books about people and place. She has studied what happens when people choose where to live in the age of remote work. Her conclusion is counterintuitive.

Remote work has not made geography irrelevant. It has made the choice more consequential.

When your employer dictated your location, the decision was constrained. When you can live anywhere, the outcome is entirely yours. This means you own it, good or bad.

The outcome matters more than you think.

The informal mentorship. The space happy hour that turns into a future referral. The Saturday morning hike with someone who will one day be your co-founder or your program manager. These still happen in physical space. They cluster where the industry clusters.

Where you choose to live is one of the highest-leverage decisions you will ever make in your aerospace career.

Not all places are equal for aerospace careers. The industry concentrates in six states and the area around the District of Columbia.

I have lived in four of the six states. I stayed many months’ worth of hotel nights in the other two and the DC area (= Lifetime Titanium Elite Marriott status).

California is the largest aerospace state by far, equaling the aerospace employment of the next two states combined.

Southern California is the densest aerospace ecosystem on the planet. SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Aerospace Corporation, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are all here, alongside dozens of commercial space startups like Rocket Lab and Vast.

Northern California has large traditional companies, like Lockheed Martin, but the Silicon Valley influence has led to startups like Planet and Astranis calling it home. NASA Ames Research Center is also located here.

Vandenberg Space Force Base is in the center of the state, and launches the second most rockets to Florida. If you want maximum access to the full range of the industry, from defense to commercial space, this is the hub.

I went to school here for my bachelor’s, got my first job out of college here, and I have moved back here two different times for jobs. Sometime in your aerospace career, you will have the option to take a job in California.

Texas is the home of the NASA Johnson Space Center, where the astronauts train and live. Anyone working on human spaceflight has a presence in the area. There are also growing start-ups like Intuitive Machines and Firefly here.

It is where SpaceX set up Starbase near Boca Chica Beach, where it is testing its Starship. It is also where Blue Origin was launching New Shepard, until putting the program on hold earlier this year.

Washington state has now become the place where more satellites have been built than anywhere else in the world due to SpaceX and Amazon Leo being located here. Boeing’s historical home, it is also home to Blue Origin’s headquarters.

I spent 2019-2025 working at both Amazon and Blue Origin, while serving as the governor appointed Chair of the Board of Directors for the Joint Center of Aerospace Technology Innovation (JCATI). It is a quietly growing aerospace hub.

Alabama is home to Rocket City, otherwise known as Huntsville. The rapidly growing city is the largest in the state. It is home to NASA’s Marshall Flight Center and the Missile Defense Agency, both co-hosted on the Redstone Arsenal.

Dr. Wernher von Braun developed the Saturn rocket in the Apollo era here. More recently, the Space Launch System was developed here to support Artemis. It is the home of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and Space Camp.

I spent three years working here early in my career, while also getting a master’s in systems engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Colorado, once ranked as high as second to California in space employment. It has slipped a bit, but it is still an important hub. Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, and BAE (formerly Ball Aerospace) are the traditional anchors. Sierra Space, a spin-off of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, and York Space Systems are examples of emerging space companies.

Every April, Colorado Springs hosts the largest global space conference, the Space Symposium.

As a fourth-generation Coloradoan, this is my space home. As well as working for multiple companies in the state, I earned my Master’s and PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado, where I now teach.

Florida and its Space Coast are all about launch. Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Center are home to most of the launch pads in the United States. If you are preparing payloads and spacecraft for launch, or finalizing the assembly of the rockets, this is the place you want to be.

Washington DC, and the adjacent area in Virginia and Maryland, are the home of government decision-makers, and the headquarters of many government agencies. North of DC is the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Due to proximity to government customers, most aerospace companies have a presence.

It is home to both the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museums on the National Mall in DC and the Udvar-Hazy facility adjacent to the Dulles airport in Virginia.

The graduating student and I went through this framework together.

She was from Seattle originally and enjoyed Colorado while going to school, so she focused on aerospace hubs in the western United States.

She researched companies that fit her skillset.

We then looked at their job postings, as well as connections to the companies I and other professors she had worked with had to open doors.

I made multiple personal connections with hiring managers.

She went through multiple interviews and lived through a few rejections.

She finally got an offer with a small company she was really excited about. It was going home to Washington.

She cancelled an interview with SpaceX to accept their offer. She realized she wanted to get more experience before tackling SpaceX, a maturity she learned through this process.

She knew where she wanted to build her life. She knew where her personal network was already rooted. She matched that to the aerospace ecosystem she wanted to grow with.

The job decision almost picked itself.

📡 OPPORTUNITY: Sometimes, the best answer to the where question is an event.

For me, it has been the Small Satellite Conference, which is celebrating its 40^th year. Four different jobs in my career were the result of conversations at this conference. I first started attending as a graduate student, and that led to the first of these four opportunities.

It has outgrown the original family reunion feel it had when the conference was small, like the satellites we discussed. It even became too big for Utah State University in Logan, UT, where it was started. It moved to Salt Lake City last year.

But the Frank J. Redd student competition, named after the conference founder, is still the best student competition/opportunity in the world. If you can attend on August 23-26, 2026, I will always recommend it. I hear it is a little easier to get a hotel room now.

📚RESOURCE: In Melody Warnick’s book If You Could Live Anywhere, she says you need a location strategy. In aerospace, to make a complex decision with competing variables, we complete a trade study. This week’s resource will combine Warnick's insights into making “where” decisions into an aerospace trade study framework.

Reply to this email with the word PLACE, and I will send you the trade study worksheet.

🌎 COMMUNITY: Every year, July 4th is the dirtiest beach day in America. Fireworks wrappers, plastic cups, bottle caps, and single-use everything are left behind when the crowds go home.

The morning after, Surfrider Foundation volunteers show up at more than 150 cleanup sites across the country to fix it.

Part of whatever place you pick on Earth is to take care of where you live. 

This issue is about choosing where you live with intention. Showing up on July 5th is what that looks like in practice. Find a cleanup near you and take care of the place you call home.

Surfrider Foundation July 5th Beach Cleanup

In an industry where failure can have catastrophic consequences, how do you manage the pressure of a major technical setback, and how do you lead a team through the aftermath?

- Simon Igel, Golden, CO, relocating to Florida to start his first job

I have been in the room when faced with technical setbacks.

I was a leader at a small satellite company where we went from the elation of witnessing our first satellite’s launch from Wallops Island to two days of an inability to communicate with it. While the anomaly was resolved, the leadership team went through a set of what-if scenarios, both technical and business-related.

The technical contingency planning and business planning that occur before, during an anomaly, and afterwards are crucial to determining how to lead a team through it.

“Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable” is the famous quote from General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It means the specific plans you create may not perfectly match the actual situation, but the process will prepare you for it.

Whether you use Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), or some other form of risk and failure identification, the results help you avoid the challenges you identify.

However, contingency plans can help you plan for failures when they occur. This applies not only to the technical design, but also to big picture issues like the business impact, customer interaction, and public communication strategy.

Then, when the problem is realized, use the muscles you built planning for the different possibilities. As Gene Kranz said during the Apollo 13 failure, “Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.”

You lead by naming reality clearly and calmly. Not minimizing it. Minimizing destroys trust faster than the setback itself.

Not catastrophizing it either, because that paralyzes the people you need thinking clearly. You start with what happened, what we know, and what we are doing next.

The aftermath is where real trust is either built or lost. Post-setback, teams are watching closely.

They are deciding whether you are with them or you will sacrifice them. They are deciding whether they will follow you in the future.

The way you handle the hard moment determines the team you will have for every moment after.

Finally, hold a post-mortem. Learn everything you can. Fix what needs fixing. Don’t look at who to blame, but what you can learn. Then move.

The goal in this industry is not to never fail. The goal is to never fail the same way twice.

Your goal this week is simple. Before you open another job listing, answer the question I asked the student.

Where do you want to live?

Run the trade study. Give yourself an honest answer before an offer forces one on you.

If you completed the Find Your Compass exercise from Issue 1 and the Superhuman Powers inventory from Issue 3, add your location strategy to the picture. You now have your why, your strengths, and your place.

Next week, we will show you how to determine what you want from a company beyond just someone who pays you. A good employer is so much more than a paycheck.