Rachel Williams

Judge
Written By Third Boxcar LLC

Open Lunar Foundation 

00:44:46
The Portia Project™ | Rachel Williams | Space Startup
 

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Show Notes

Rachel Williams, Executive Director of the Open Lunar Foundation, shares her path from a space startup to a lunar governance nonprofit. Along the way, she shares leadership lessons and tips for navigating career transitions and finding your way to a meaningful next step in your career.

 
 

About Rachel Williams:

The Portia Project™ | Rachel Williams | Space Startup

Rachel Williams is the Executive Director of the Open Lunar Foundation, a global nonprofit dedicated to ensuring humanity’s return to the Moon is cooperative, transparent, and sustainable. She leads programs that turn good-faith coordination into practice—advancing tools, standards, and institutions that lower operational risk and strengthen shared stewardship of space. 

An experienced builder at the intersection of technology, policy, and discovery, Rachel has spent more than a decade shaping early-stage initiatives, startups, and public-interest projects. Before Open Lunar, she helped launch and operate a commercial space startup in Alaska focused on standardizing access to space. She is motivated by efficient, values-driven execution and the equitable development of the space domain.

At Open Lunar, Rachel stewards a portfolio that includes the Lunar Ledger—a global registry effort to improve transparency and coordination for lunar missions—alongside fellowships and public-interest projects that set practical precedents for safe, sustainable activity on the Moon.

Rachel splits her time between Chile and the U.S., drawing energy from the outdoors through mountaineering, biking, and surfing projects; she calls the coastal astronomical city of La Serena home when in Chile.

Rachel Williams

 

Transcript

We're continuing with our series focused on leaders in the space arena. We are really pleased to have on the show Rachel Williams, who is the Executive Director of the nonprofit, the Open Lunar Foundation. Rachel, welcome.

Thanks for having me here.

How Rachel Got Into The Space Arena

One of the things that we were talking about before we pushed record was the variety of ways in which people can contribute to space and to all of the exciting things that are happening in space right now, sometimes with a technical degree and sometimes without a technical degree. That's one of the stories that metastories I think that the show tells around the space series, that there are lawyers involved in various ways. There are non-lawyers involved in various ways. There's a lot going on in space besides just building the rockets and all of that right now. There's always a meandering path to getting there, and each person's path is different. I wanted to ask you, first of all, how did you came to work at Open Lunar, but more specifically in the space arena?

Great comments. I suppose I should start from the beginning to provide some context about my background and how it led me to space. I don't have a traditional degree in space. In fact, I went on a traditional upbringing. I was actually homeschooled for the first sixteen years of my life. We learned a lot about the social sciences and a lot about history, but not so much about the heart sciences.

When I actually entered public school at sixteen, I really struggled in those arenas. Throughout my life, I felt like I was always learning things that people had learned years before me. When I say my education was really not grounded in science, it started really from the beginning. In college, I studied policy and epidemiology. I was also fascinated and really interested in the UN and the International Criminal Court and all of these different legislative bodies.

Just knew I wanted to work somehow in policy, but didn't necessarily know the avenue to do so. My early career, if you look at my resume or my LinkedIn, is working for all of these different policy organizations. I worked on welfare, I worked in clean water reform, and I worked in global policy. The really big string and through line was working in organizations that had some policy impact with really small teams and big missions.

Throughout this time, I was developing my skill sets, and I didn't necessarily have a niche. I always felt like I saw these lawyers or these academics or these subject matter experts who have so much to contribute. I felt like my skill set was a lot more general, but I came to learn that the flexibility that I was obtaining throughout jumping into different arenas, learning, seeing gaps, creating processes, and filling them, allowed me to really grow into different leadership skills across all sorts of different domains. Eventually, that led me to space.

I was given an opportunity, actually approached by a board member when I was working at a different organization in global affairs, saying, “I know I've got this idea. It's a space startup.” I used to work for SpaceX, and he said, “Do you want to build this with me?” Really thinking about growing up, you can understand why I was maybe a little intimidated. How could someone who doesn't have this background be able to contribute to space in a substantial way? I came to find out that I had a lot to contribute, and now I'm working as the executive director of a space governance program. It all comes together. It's quite beautiful.

Working With Small Teams With Big Missions

I was thinking that's always the case. If you go back in retrospect about things, you can see a sequence, and it makes sense, but when you're going through it, it does not at all seem like a path or even where that path's going to go. Having a certain amount of faith in that and just moving forward. There are a couple of things that you talked about, which I think are important, that I don't think people always think about, when you said, “I came to know that I really like working with small teams with big missions.”

I think that people don't often think about that when they're making career decisions. What environment do I thrive in, and where can I contribute the most? People think about that more substantively, as opposed to what dynamics do I work well in, and I can contribute the most to. That was an important observation. I don't know if you came to that or how you came to think about things that way, but it's a valuable perspective because that is so important about like your day-to-day.

Finding what feels good to you. What feels good to me might not feel good to you, but you have to experiment. I found that working with small teams that were often resource-strapped. Usually, if you're a nonprofit or you have a big mission that you don't have enough people for, you don't have enough money, or all of the above. I found that those opportunities and those teams gave me more opportunities to diversify my skill sets because we need someone who is maybe running operations, but also doing strategy.

You actually have to get your hands dirty here and there and help us build the technology. For me and for my personality, a lot of people use the term generalist as someone who can pop into any area at any time. I found that it was really compatible. You are never bored. You never know what's coming.

That is how I feel about my appellate practice. I feel like if I were just a subject matter expert, like I only do certain kinds of cases, I only do employment cases or environmental cases. I might not still be a practicing lawyer because I like that variety as well. As an appellate lawyer, we're really a generalists, but we become specialists in each area as we develop them. It's different. Every day I'm working on a different case, a different law. The common thread is that it's being developed, because otherwise they wouldn't come to me.

The answer is clear. They don't need to get a court to set a standard or whatever. There's that, but you do get skills and specialties as you go along. There's also something else you said about that, which I think is crucial in terms of, like you said, building leadership skills, but also because you weren't in a particular niche, like this is my specific subject area, and this is how I understand this larger subject, you're able to pull back. You can see more like a 360-degree view of what's going on. That's actually what's required of a leader.

That's helpful. When I first joined the space industry, when I was talking to one of my mentors, he said, “One of the greatest skill sets that you bring to the team is not being from the space industry because you have that zoomed out view. You have that idea and the lived experience of how to run organizations and how to run strategy, but you're not necessarily bogged down in the nuance.” It gives you a strategic advantage.

That's an added skill that's necessary, as this person observed that others don't necessarily have or really have the perspective to have. All of those are interesting. I think people, especially people starting out or in school, think about, “What do I want to do when I grow up, or be when I grow up?” First of all, it can adjust as you change. Also thinking about these things when you're thinking about where you want to work and how you want to work and how you want to contribute and what's meaningful to you. I think it's really valuable to think about it as building skills in the different arenas.

It's collecting Pokemon cards. You can apply those to any situation you're in. What you're really doing is you're building adaptability. Adaptability is the most helpful thing that you can have in most workplaces.

Building adaptability is the most helpful thing you can have in most workplaces.

That's true. I also think about transferability of skills, because I think you can think about what you do in a particular arena as that's a corporate lawyer thing, or that's whatever. It is, that's what you're doing with it. The underlying skills that you're learning are transferable to other settings. That's why I think it's valuable to think about the skill thing because I think especially people who are not only starting out, but people who might be like, “I want to change to do something. This no longer works for me or whatever. How do I select what that is?”

Pushing For Significant Changes Through Policy Development

Part of it is assessing the skills you already have that could be valuable in another sector that might not seem remarkable to you, but in another setting, they might be unique and helpful. I know some people have talked about working in policy. I think sometimes people think about that as like, you're just helping lobby senators or whatever. Policy is broader than that, think, especially at an international level. Maybe you can talk about some of that work, and maybe talk about Open Lunar's work a little bit in that regard. It's more changeable.

When I first graduated, I had a few different avenues in mind for taking my life. There was one point I was thinking, “I'll go directly to law school.” At the same time, I was looking at an offer from the Peace Corps and another internship. I also thought about entering the workforce. I think that we're faced with a lot of those decisions, and depending on what you take, it can lead to completely different outcomes.

I ended up entering the workforce, even with the idea that I want to contribute to positive policy development. I think what I've come to learn in my career is that there are so many ways, traditionally and non-traditionally, to contribute to the policy world and policy development. I think actually highlighting Open Lunar where I'm currently working, is a really great way of showing maybe what those non-traditional.

Open Lunar is a really unique nonprofit organization. We work internationally. We are not state-driven. We are not commercially driven. We are completely neutral. Our mission is to ensure a peaceful and cooperative presence on the moon. We do that through the development of technology, policy, and infrastructure. We have a really amazing community. We have astronauts, international space lawyers, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

They came together and they founded Open Lunar because they noticed this gap, that there are hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in our return to the moon. However, rules and laws and regulations, and really the details of how we get there and what we do when we get there, aren't being worked out. Obviously, we're living in a moment where commercial companies are leading the return to the moon.

As we know from Earth, precedents are extremely important. Precedents often lead to behavior and then sometimes even law. The first interactions that we have on the moon can be set as lasting precedents. If we're not careful about those interactions, then we can go down a slippery slope or a dangerous slope. What we do at Open Lunar is design projects that shape positive precedent and that often turn into policy.

We're focused on the moon because the moon is our closest celestial neighbor, of course, but the moon is also a stepping stone for deeper space exploration and a reflection of Earth. As space governance and space interactions play out, many of those first precedents will be set on the moon. From those precedents, we will have deeper space governance. We call our strategy third-way governance. It's not top-down.

It's not coming from an international body. It's not coming from the States. It's not coming from commercial players. Rather, it's a reflection of humanity's best values. We are working with commercial stakeholders and governments to create projects that instill collaboration and cooperation. I think to put a little more color to that, too, you can think about one of our projects we're working on. It's all about sharing information in the lunar environment.

The lunar registry?

Yes. Our registry and our ledger project. Sharing information is really crucial, but it's also really hard, and it can be somewhat controversial. There are literal laws that prevent countries from talking to each other and sharing basic situational awareness information. As this lunar space gets more and more crowded, we're going to see conjunction events or events where maybe missions or spacecraft are very close to each other. Also, we have different landing areas and dust mitigation effects. It's really important to share information.

What we're seeing right now in LEO and some of the other Earth orbits is that information sharing is not the default. We are working with commercial providers to create a platform to share information. It's been very successful this far, and we have commercial providers sharing information with each other who otherwise would not have. That's an example of how we are influencing precedence on the moon to create policy.

That's so important at the international law level and in terms of setting norms and standards, which can then become the foundation for the legal standards themselves. It's important to get those right. Also, it is important to have a container for those kinds of discussions. The UN and the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs have often been the container for that, but they're very used to having the government representatives. They're expanding that a little bit more now to commercial, but having as many containers as possible, I think that they are able to hold discussions between different actors, or allow for this transparency, which is really helpful.

Especially as commercial players are leading some of the Return to the Moon, it's important that they're in on those conversations too. A lot of room for collaboration. Space has always been somewhat collaborative. Space is hard. Think about the International Space Station and its developments and rights. If it wasn't collaborative, where would we be, really? There are a lot of reasons to hope for space collaboration.

The moon's getting norms set and getting communication happening with activities on the moon is important because there is so much activity planned by so many different people, and the likelihood, as you nicely said, of conjunctions happening is a little bit higher than in other arenas. It's important to put some thought into what the standards and approaches might be to prevent any friction and to make it as smooth as possible, which is really beneficial to all in their endeavors on the moon as well.

It's staying a couple of steps ahead of those planned activities and making sure that we're doing all we can across all domains for everyone.

How To Land A Role In Space Governance

It's having discussions now at the UN legal subcommittee and copious about some of those lunar activities. It's a good time to be ahead of that and to share what Open Lunar is doing in that setting as well. What advice would you give to people who might think that they want to have some role in space governance, space policy, or anything like that? Do you have any advice for those who might think they're just curious about it, or how they might explore that? Let's put it that way.

That's getting creative. You don't only have to be a space lawyer or a lawyer to work in this arena. There are a lot of really powerful projects or ways of contributing, maybe to an engineering team with more of a thoughtful eye to the implications of your product. I think one of the most beautiful things about space that can also potentially be concerning is that we're still figuring things out, and there are a lot of personality-driven and ad hoc decisions that are being made. Your influence is bigger than you think. Space also needs more governance and more policy.

It needs more human values integrated. We're seeing a lot more NGOs, projects, and organizations that are adding departments to help think about some of these things. I would say get creative. Also, know your worth. You always have something to contribute. We often bring in people outside the space industry into the space industry because they have so much earthly and terrestrial knowledge that can be translated. We've already done a lot of this. We're just doing it in a harder environment on an international scale. I hope that would encourage people to think about a career in space policy.

Building A Startup Space Company

Those transferable skills and transferable knowledge. That's helpful. You're right. Some things are not, we don't need to. Let's say we can be informed by what we've done on Earth and at least pay attention to that in terms of, do we need to start afresh on everything, or can we go back to things that we've done here that work and that could work also in the space environment? I wanted to go back. You had mentioned that you went to a startup space company. I think one might have thought you might have entered the space arena through something like Open Lunar or a nonprofit, as opposed to starting with a company. Maybe you can talk about that, and how you contributed to that arena, and what that was like.

At some point in my career, I ended up moving to Alaska. I grew up in the Midwest and Michigan. There's one side of me that is very business-oriented, and then another side of me that's quite an adventurer. I moved up to Alaska to train and climb a mountain. I thought, “This would be a temporary transition. It takes about a year to train and get the skillsets for this mountain in a month to climb.”

While I was in Alaska, I ended up finding this global affairs job that I worked at, which was really incredible, bringing the world to Alaska, which can be quite isolated. During that time, I got approached by a board member again, saying, “I got this idea. Are you with me?” I made the decision to take the leap and do the hard thing and enter the space industry as employee number two.

That means you had to have many hats.

It means I had to have all of the hacks. It was intimidating. That was one of those big career decisions that you're saying, “I could take the easy path or the hard path.” I jumped right in. Of course, you think, “Now I'm going to a commercial company. I've only worked at nonprofits.” What I found out very quickly was that you can work at a commercial company that is mission-driven and has values. One of my favorite applications at the launch company, which was the name of the Alaskan company, was that we created a no-weapons policy, which meant that we would not take money or work on anything that could be dual-use or defense.

Even if you have only worked in nonprofits, you can still find a mission-driven commercial company.

A lot of commercial money is tied up there. Of course, it plays a very strategic role in national security. It was just a way that we wanted to contribute more to the exploration space. We started as chief of staff, and over four years, we grew from what I want to say, maybe a $100,000 annual company, to a multi-million dollar company. We had a staff of 25, and I was running the company as COO. Lots of war stories. Nothing could go wrong.

I probably cannot imagine. It's only a part of it that you’re doing.

That's where your adaptability comes in. Employee number two, that means you're building everything from the ground up. You are deciding what the logo is, and then you are negotiating a contract with the government or a big launch company. You just have to adapt, and you have to wear all of the hats, and you have to step up to the challenges. I remember a few times when we had contracts being delayed, and we were counting on those contracts for payroll.

We had to quickly pivot and figure out who we're going to keep and all of our people. I remember vendor issues where a part didn't come in until two months later, and we had to tell the government that things were going late. Even in classic Alaska style, there was a moment where a bear broke into our office, and I had to take our intern and hide from the bear. It's a little bit of everything. That's really where I found I thrive.

In the startup environment, high risk, high reward, process creation, and development. I think that all of the Pokemon cards that I picked up along the way allowed me to utilize my skill set at the launch company. We ended up selling the launch company after four years of bootstrapping the company, which meant we took no outside investment, which we were really proud of. It really allowed us to stick to our morals, but it was also a lot of hard work.

Shortly after our accident and being in a high-profile decision-making role at a commercial startup company, I saw a lot of decision makers talking about, brainstorming, and creating technology that had really wonderful purposes, but other technology or other ideas that could be a violation of international law or could have the potential to do great harm. I thought there had to be an organization in space working on the collaborative and cooperative development of space. Thankfully, I found Open Lunar pretty shortly after that.

That's so interesting. I think that's a really good observation to you about like the mission-driven companies, because I think sometimes people go, “I cannot work in commercial.” There are companies that are like that. In fact, there's like a whole category of companies now that have a social mission to some degree in their corporate mission. I think, just not discarding that idea, there might be a company that aligns with a mission that you're interested in, just like a nonprofit has. To be open to that, like not being too heavy your blinders on too much when you're looking at opportunities or thinking about them. I want to explore mountain climbing, though. Did you climb the mountain?

I climbed the mountain. Twenty-seven grueling days at Mount Denali up in Alaska.

I was wondering if that's what it was.

I got to the top. I was very lucky to be able to summit that year.

That's an amazing accomplishment. When you said that, I thought of the adventure part. I'm like, “That side of you fits with the high-risk, high-reward part of the startup.” We all have different facets of our personality that come out.

Space exploration as a whole is quite on brand.

I actually interviewed one of the most down-to-earth people I interviewed for the podcast in a previous episode, who is a justice on the Alaska Supreme Court. Pretty cool, pretty no-nonsense, and just a really cool person. Her whole family was there when we were having the interview, and everything was really cute in her office. Everyone was just hanging out, enjoying this event because, as you said, people don't think of Alaska for certain things. She's a really neat lady, and you might enjoy that episode as well because of your Alaska connection.

I'll check it out.

Making A Real Impact By Staying Curious

She was a really cool lady. I love your explanation, and I also think that it's helpful to hear your thought process about how you go from one place or one opportunity to another. I think that question of like, of following your curiosity in a way and following the questions that you have. Having seen this, you're cooking now, having been in commercial space, I see, I have this like larger question, policy-related, with regard to space, and how and where would I best solve that, be part of that solution. That's another really interesting way of thinking about your next step, really having it flow from your curiosity and the questions you want to answer.

Being driven by your personal values, too. It can be intimidating, and the space industry is much different than it was even 5, 6, 7 years ago. There are so many more organizations, so much more open conversation. Generally, the public is way more educated about space. There's a lot of opportunity to make a difference and a lot of opportunity to find something that fits within what you're concerned about and what you want to make an impact on. It's inspiring that way.

I also think about what drives that next decision. I think following that curiosity is the most natural way to do it. Also, a way that helps ensure that you are contributing at your highest and best use level, because usually, you're following your curiosity, you're passionate about it. You're going to say, “This is the area in which I want to make an impact.” We all want to have some meaning in the work that we do, and different kinds of meaning for different people. That seems like the most clear, purest, what should I do next in my career path approach to it is like, “Where do I feel called to contribute?”

As you progress throughout your career, your curiosity changes. It's really about chasing that curiosity gap. I like that.

The Power Of Being Mentored And Mentoring Others

As I say, most people will do the analytical part, but that's important too. Starting with, where do I feel I should be contributing right now? That's really helpful. You were involved, I think, early on in the study and creation of the Lunar Ledger Project. Is that right?

Yeah, when I first joined Open Lunar, I joined as a research fellow. I was working in a part-time capacity and working with one of our colleagues, Sam, to investigate the Lunar Ledger project.

I think that also shows the opportunity for growth and expansion within organizations, too. You did that before with the company you were with, but now it's the same thing at Open Lunar. You started as a research fellow, and now you're the executive director. I think that's a way of reminding people to, if you're curious or interested in something like finding a window or a door, whatever that's open that you can contribute to, you don't know where that might lead down the path.

You can often explore those things at the same time. While I was at the launch company, I was a research fellow with Open Lunar, saying, “Is this even something that I can comprehend, I can grasp, I believe in?” Again, there are lots of opportunities out there. Make sure that they fit with your work-life balance. It doesn't have to be a super uncomfortable, big transition either.

I think that's I think that's great. I think that is just like a good tangible example of how you can expand your horizons and see if that's something, but is it something you really like doing? Dip your toe in the water with the research fellow position? That's good. I do ask people this as well, usually, what role have mentors or sponsors played in your career?

I think that sometimes newer, younger people, people in school still think like, “I'm going to find like the one mentor and that mentor is going to follow me or be with me my whole career. That's how I'm going to do well.’ I think that mentorship has a lot of different faces, and it looks different in different scenarios. I ask this in part because I want people to appreciate the number of different ways that they recognize mentorship and help when it shows up. After all, it may not show up in a way that they're envisioning.

I think that when I started my career, I had a very specific version or vision of what mentorship could be, and reflecting on it, it's completely different than what you originally assigned to it. Mentors. I owe everything to my mentors. I've had such a variety of mentors. Some very topic-specific, some strategic, some emotional, I pride myself on always surrounding myself with a wise group of advisors. That's necessary for anyone in any position.

Surrounding yourself with a wise group of advisors is necessary at any leadership position.

You think about your personal life and the different individuals you lean on, whether that's a spouse, a therapist, family, or friends. We should have that same mentality towards our work because our work is hard, and we have interpersonal relationships, and it's important. You need clarity, and it's hard to do by yourself. Always leveraged mentors. Mentors have seen me at my best. They've seen me at not my best, and just having the safe space to truly be seen is one of the best assets that I have in any of my leadership positions.

I also love to mentor women, specifically as well. Love to mentor a lot of people, but I also think it took me a really long time to realize my worth as a woman in this industry and realize I had something to offer. I can see that now in the generation below me. I love to pull that out. Mentorship is everything. Everything comes down to relationships.

That's a helpful description of the different forms of mentorship, too, and how people can show up for you in different ways. Everybody has different things they're good at, too. Some are great mentors in different ways because they have different things they're really good at and other things they're really not good at. You cannot ask someone to be someone that it's not their thing.

In my experience, there are a lot of mentors who have come at the right time. They're not in your life the whole time, but they're there at a crucial point. They recognize or see something in you, and they see where you can contribute, and they help facilitate that. That may be just a certain moment in time that someone's there to help, but it doesn't mean that they're not an important mentor or sponsor in your career.

The more I am in rooms where decisions are made, the more I realize that certain things that have happened in my career wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't spoken up for me in a room that I never knew about. I never really knew how something happened or how an opportunity happened. It always happens that someone has promoted you or said something positive about you or put your name in the hat for an opportunity, usually in a closed room, which you would never know.

I always feel like, “Now I know there were people I may not have ever even known about who stood up at the right time and helped me get to a certain opportunity.” I think the best way to do that, because you don't know who those people are, is to do what you do and pay it forward. I'm going to help others and pay it forward because I don't care whether they ever know that that was me or not, but I want to pay it forward in the same way that the people have done that for me.

I completely agree. It's almost like surrounding yourself with advocates. You don't know when those advocates are at play or not. It's crucial.

Answering Rapid-Fire Questions

I think that paying it forward is really important. That's part of what this podcast is, and know what you're contributing to as well. Thank you for doing that also. Usually, I end with a little lightning round set of questions. I'll ask you a few. Which talent would you most like to have but don't?

I would love to have the ability to have a perfect memory.

People who can really just remember, like almost photographic.

What an asset that would be.

It's true. I had a friend who was a law clerk with me, and he would remember everything like that, “Yeah, it's the bottom of this page on this new slip opinion that just came out this morning.” They just had this amazing ability. I don't have that either, but it would be lovely if we did. Who are some of your favorite writers?

Right now, I'm reading a book called Let My People Surf, and it's from the founder of Patagonia. It is a really amazing book that I would recommend any manager to read. It's really a memoir, but also a manifesto of how to build good teams and how to let your employees live. If the surface is good, go surf, trust your employees, the work will be waiting. It really is challenging the traditional model of corporations and employees. I just think we need to be thinking from a human-first approach rather than maybe a deliverable or profit-first approach. I'm really enjoying that book. Lots of good leadership books, too.

I figured I was like, I was just thinking about that. I was like, “Now I have a follow-up question from that. I'm going to vary from the lightning round.” Building teamwork. What do you think they are? I want to say each organization is different, but I'll say best practices, but they can vary depending on where you are. In terms of building a good team and bringing out the best in the individuals in that team, both individually and collaboratively, what do you think are some of the secret sauces that organizations have that allow for that teamwork?

I've seen so many different iterations of this. I've worked in teams that work really well together. Of course, you work in teams that don't work as well. I think from a leadership perspective, hire people you radically trust and let them do their best. I really believe in a leader-leader mentality rather than a leader-follower mentality. There's this amazing book called Turn the Ship Around, which is how leaders can empower their team members to be leaders.

I think that's just the best way of doing anything. Another touch that I think is crucial in my workplace is just empathy. We're all humans, we're all doing our best, we're not robots. We need to be treated as such. Sometimes you have good days, sometimes you have bad days. Having that consideration and flexibility will make all the difference in being able to show up to work and do the thing you're working on. I'd say those are my top tips.

Hire good people, trust them, and let them go. That's a lot of it, I think.

It's hard.

It can be hard to do that, but I think people enjoy it. I think people who are self-starters or whatever, who want to just go do their own task, and just let me do that. “Don't bother me to micromanage me about it.” Enjoy that environment. I'm going to check out that book. That sounds really interesting. I'd heard about it, but I was like, “I remember now I heard about that book, and it sounds really interesting.” He was a maverick guy anyway in so many different ways. Who is your hero in real life?

I feel like I have so many heroes. I couldn't name just one. I have so many inspiring friends in my life who are making huge social and global impacts, but also just the way they show up to their communities and their friendships is so inspiring to me. I would say my closest friends, my partners, I've got so many heroes, I cannot list just one.

For what in life do you feel most grateful?

The community that I've been able to build. We have an amazing lunar community, but even just my immediate community, I live in Chile and La Serena, Chile, which is really beautiful, an astronomical city, and I've just been able to build the deepest roots here and just make things fun.

How did you come here? What brought you there?

There are a lot of telescopes in Chile, a lot of high-altitude telescopes. We worked on the telescopes, and I got invited down a few years ago and was working remotely, and then just fell in love with the community, and now I'm here most of the year.

That's really neat. That's great. Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite to a dinner party? It can be anyone who's still with us on earth. It can be a combination of those folks. Who would you invite?

Such a good question. Mine would be Jane Goodall. I am so inspired by Jane. Maybe she could bring some of her chimps as well.

That fits, I think, with your interest in the environment too. I say interest, but it seems like it's somewhat of a spiritual connection for you with the land, wherever you are, both Alaska and Chile now. I can see that in how you describe moving there.

It's a foundational experience of my life.

Last question. What is your motto, if you have one?

I would say it's probably more of a mantra. I think it's probably, after all the years of working in small teams and startups, but everything is workable if you just meet it with ease. I think that being calm and not panicking has allowed me to thrive in a lot of environments that could have potentially gone sideways. I like to remind my team of that as well.

Everything is workable if you just meet it with ease.

I think one of the things that people think about when they think about startups is chaos. They're like, “My gosh,” because you could wear so many hats at any particular time, and you're trying to put your finger in the dike sometimes, that there's this very high chaos stress level. I didn't see that at all in your description of it. I thought, “Rachel's very calm.” This mantra is very fitting for what I see in you, that you're embodying it, Rachel. That's good. The mantra is working for you.

Thank you. It's good news to get here. I appreciate it.

I know. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I know it took practice to get to that point, and you're demonstrating it. Good work on the mantra. Rachel, thank you so much for joining the show and sharing your career journey, but also your perspective as a leader across multiple organizations. It's really valuable, and I really appreciate your joining the show.

It’s an honor to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Third Boxcar LLC
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Victoria Samson