Emily Carney is the founder of Space Hipsters, one of the world’s largest space advocacy groups on Facebook with over 60,000 members. 

Emily’s passion for space history and her initiative in creating a community around space advocacy have significantly contributed to public engagement in space exploration.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• How a childhood fascination with space led to the creation of Space Hipsters.

• The memorial spaceflight company sending DNA to space.

• Emily’s views on the democratization of space and the opportunities in the modern space economy for non-traditional roles, such as writers and artists.

• How Emily uses her platform to educate and engage people in space history and current space missions.

• Emily’s projects and aspirations for expanding the community.

Quote:

“You can’t have that success, you can’t get what you want if you’re terrified of it. You just have to learn how to embrace it.”

- Emily Carney

Episode Links:

• Memorial Spaceflights: https://www.celestis.com/
• Connect with Emily Carney
• LinkedIn
• X
• Threads
• Insta
• Join the Space Hipsters group on Facebook

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Join our journey into the world of education and space: https://interastra.space

Just be unafraid. Try to be bold. Just keep going with it. And like I said, you know, you can't have that success. You can't get what you want if you're terrified of it. You just have to learn how to embrace it.

Hi. I am Emily Carney, and you are listening to Your Business In Space.

I am the founder of Space Hipsters, and that means I started one of the world's largest space advocacy groups dedicated to the past, present, and future of space flight.

Space Hipsters is a group on Facebook.

Right now, it has roughly 61,000 people in it, plus or minus a few hundred.

The name, actually, my husband came up with it as a joke because I wanted to start, you know, just a spaceflight group for me and my friends to hang out at.

And I asked my husband, well, what do you think I should call it?

And he said, well, why don't you call it Space Hipsters because you think you did everything first?

And I was like, You're really funny. Blah blah blah blah blah. I kept the name as a joke, and it kind of took so much traction.

And people just identified with it so much that I've just kept the name.

I grew up not very far away from, Florida's Space Coast. I grew up on, the other side of Florida.

I was very little, but I do remember it. It was STS 2.

I remember my mom took me outside to watch it because the Space Shuttle was brand new. It just started.

So that was the 2nd launch of the shuttle program, and I vividly remember it because I was like, wow.

That's something going up in space because you could see it from my side of the coast.

And from that point on, I was pretty much just get, you know, any shuttle toy I could get.

I was just obsessed with get, you know, any shuttle toy I could get. I was just obsessed with the program and, in spaceflight in general, not just the shuttle.

But as I started to, you know, mature and read a little more about space flight, I read about all the other different human being space flight programs such as Skylab. Skylab is probably my favorite human spaceflight program. And, you know, and also, you know, the Apollo lunar missions are obviously incredible as well.

I mean, those are just unbelievable, and just beautifully photographed and insane. But, yeah, like I said, pretty much from that point on, I was just dreaming of space flight. I don't know if I could go to space because of my health isn't the greatest, but, my DNA did go to space earlier this year. So I'd like to think that I am a space traveler of some sort. Even though, I can't say I'm an astronaut. I'm a DNA space traveler. So part of me is in space now. I work for a company called Celestus, and Celestus is the world's 1st spaceflight memorial service company.

And, basically, what Celestus does is they depending on your that sounds morbid, but it's actually a really beautiful idea.

Depending on your, burial disposition, you can either have some of your cremains or you can have your DNA spent to space. And earlier this year, my, DNA was sent on the, inaugural Vulcan Centaur launch, and it was basically and it's the Enterprise flight, and that was basically being sent to deep space. I mean, beyond basically, in a solar orbit into deep space to forever. If it comes back, something's wrong.

But, yeah, I'm very excited. I think it's gonna be wonderful. Like I said, I'm not I don't think I can consider myself an astronaut, but I think it's just it's a wonderful idea to think that my, DNA is gonna be out there forever, you know, and it's gonna be in deep space, and I'm among probably the first people to do that.

So that's really exciting. I think my entrance into spaceflight was very unorthodox. I did not start in the space industry at all. I when I was 19, I joined the Navy, pretty much straight out of high school. I graduated, and a few months later, I joined the Navy.

I joined the Navy as a Navy nuke. That's basically a nuclear, technician. I was a mechanic, and I worked in a plant as a, propulsion plant mechanic on radioactive fluid systems and secondary fluid systems as well.

I absolutely hated it. I I taught in a public school. That's not a slam against students. I I really hated the bureaucracy associated with public school teaching in the United States and things like that. It just was not into it. So I quit, and it was humbling for a while. I I really couldn't find a lot of work. It was during the, recession time in the United States as well.

So there really weren't many jobs out there, and I really had a desire. I'd always loved space flight.

And I really was like, man, I would love to be like a tech writer or something. I would love to write about this for a living, but at the time, there were really not many women doing that. I mean, I know that sounds very weird, but there weren't many women tech writers at the time. And I was like, you know, I'll just start doing it on my own.

It's on the National Space Society blog roll now, but I started that back then. From there, I branched out. I've done some a lot of other space writing for other websites such as, I've I have some work on medium.com as well.

I wrote for Ars Technica for a little bit. I wrote for, I've written for the space review.

I've written for America Space. I've written for a few other outlets.

So that's what I've been doing probably for the past, god, 16 years or so.

Before then I before I started my blog, I did a little other, I wanna say I did some other freelance work as well, but I really wanted to pursue that because I love writing.

I love space flight, and I really wanted to mix both of them.

And I can't say at the time it came from, like, I wanna teach people about space history, but I just I just love space history so much, and I was so enthusiastic about it that I really wanted to just share that joy with people.

It was more from that than from, you know, I wanna teach people about everything, and, you know, I I wanna set them right.

I think that came later. You know, I became more kind of obsessed with the spelling myths later.

But at the beginning, it was more just like, this is my passion, and I wanna share it with people.

I started to go to space events. Back then, the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation was doing autograph shows, and a lot of the Apollo and early shuttle astronauts would go there.

So I started going to those, and, really, that was when I started meeting a lot of the people in Space Hipsters, like, people in the community and people who were participating in the group, and that was just a lot of fun. And at the same time, the community was just, it kept growing and growing and growing. And now, as I've said earlier, it's almost, god, 61,000 people, which is just mind blowing. But, at the time, it was a much smaller group, you know, and I loved going to events and actually meeting people in the community, hearing what got them into spaceflight, hearing their stories, and really hearing sort of their interest in furthering, you know, the space community and sort of enriching the community. Another event that was really amazing at the time was also Space Fest.

We would just meet up and just you know, for about a week or so, we would just have a wonderful time, enjoy enjoy talking to some of our heroes and just, you know, just relax with each other and enjoy a lot of lectures and, meet a lot of our famous or our favorite authors as well. But I would say that's kind of really what opened the door for me. A lot of it for me was just connecting with people, you know, in the industry, other authors, and things like that.

I wanna give a big shout out to, Colin Burgess, who is the editor for the Outward Odyssey series with University of Nebraska because that was one of the series that really sort of enriched my interest in spaceflight.

I mean, it's just an amazing series of books with stories that weren't really told before, and I feel like that was another sort of avenue that really opened my eyes to, wow. You know? Maybe one day I could do one of these books or, wow, you know, maybe I could be a space author myself or something like that. Maybe I could do this. Yeah.

I would say going to those events, really meeting with people in the community, making those connections with people, that, to me, really opened my eyes to what this was about. And, also, Space Hipsters, we've tried to connect with the community in other ways to help students as well. So that's something that is really near and dear to us is just to really you know, we just wanna enrich I keep saying the word enrich, but it really is something we're very dedicated to. We really wanna, you know, make this something that lasts. Where you know, I know I won't live forever, but if one of the kids that we help, you know, could maybe be among the first to walk on Mars or among the first to, you know, maybe help people walk on Mars or something like that. I think, yeah, my job would be done. That would be great. When it comes to the business of space, the biggest misconception is you have to be like a scientist or an engineer to work in the industry.

I'm either I have some engineering background, but I don't have an engineering degree. So I can't really work in that capacity in the industry at all. But, I am a writer. I am somebody who has a interest in the space community at large, and I've tried to parlay that into a lot of different things. You know, writing about spaceflight, explaining it to regular people, that's a big deal.

And I've had a lot of, success, I think, doing that, you know, and my I wanna say my version of success isn't necessarily monetary success, but it's, you know, just success in, okay, you know, I'm able to do this. I'm able to put this out there and people get it, and people enjoy it as well. To be successful in space, I believe you've gotta be very open minded.

The space economy now is much different as it was 30, 40 years ago. You gotta be very open minded.

There's different people now in the industry than there were back then. We gotta we gotta really make it inclusive for everybody, I think. The best bit of advice I've been given about the business of space actually came very recently. It's just be yourself and don't be afraid of the success you get. You know, I've been lucky to have a lot of, I think, visibility in the community.

But, really, the whole time, I was always like, man, I don't deserve this.

I shouldn't be out there. You can't have success if you're afraid of it. Granted, success comes with its pitfalls as well. You're gonna have people trolling you and things like that, but just be unafraid. Try to be bold. Just keep going with it. And like I said, you know, you can't have that success. You can't get what you want if you're terrified of it.

You just have to learn how to embrace it. The opportunities that I'm most excited about in the business to space is I think the space economy is so much different from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. Back then, all we really had in the United States was the Space Shuttle. Space Shuttle was awesome, but it was run by the government. Nowadays, we have multiple avenues to space. There are multiple companies out there building infrastructure or working on building train to all manner of space travelers, not necessarily the trained NASA astronaut. It's also gonna open the industry to all sorts of people to just get in the industry. And, you know, they might not be astronauts or space travelers, but they might be able to fulfill some other role.

You know, I'm seeing I think we're gonna see a lot more people who are writers or artists have some kind of direct participation in this industry because of those things opening up. You know, it's not necessarily you don't necessarily have to be, you know, this great engineer, this great scientist to do it anymore. You can have, participation in it and you could be somebody like me who's a writer. You know? So I think those are things that are gonna be very exciting. I think, you know, down the next few decades, we're gonna see a lot of that where it's gonna be a people's space economy versus the government space economy. And as a result, we're gonna see a lot of new players in it, and that's gonna be exciting. Well, in Space Shifters, I'm very focused on enriching the community through giving students and hopefully young people more opportunities, to go to things like, space camp, to go to things, maybe events. We are in the process in Space Hipsters of starting a nonprofit where we would like to hopefully, in the future, make, scholarships and funds available to students so they can, you know, perhaps go to school or go to a program or something like that.

So that's something that we're definitely focused on. As far as my writing is concerned, I'm currently finishing I don't wanna talk too much about it yet. We haven't formally announced it, but I'm currently finishing up a project with a friend of mine that everybody will see next year. I'm very excited about this, and, I'm doing I I I'm still doing a lot of oral histories and interviews for Space 3 point o, with the significant figures in spaceflight. And I'm also doing sort of my personal writing about, you know, space history, whatever really captures my fancy in space history, I sometimes just spontaneously write about it. So those are really things that I'm focused on at the moment.

I'm Emily Carney, and you've been listening to Your Business in Space.

You can connect with me at Space Hipsters on Facebook.

You can also connect with me on Twitter at Emily L Carney.

I'm also on Threads. I'm also on Instagram, so you can hook up with me through there.

To discover more, head to InterAstra.Space

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