Yahoo Finance's Sibile Marcellus speaks with Ariel Ekblaw, Director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative on working with Jeff Bezos rocket company Blue Origin and a career in aerospace.

- Well, Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon on July 5th. So his next move, which makes a whole lot of sense, is flying to space. So is a career in aerospace just for billionaire businessmen and women, or is there an opportunity for the rest of us? Here's [? Seville ?] with the latest installment of Career Control.

- Jeff Bezos is scheduled to go to space on July 20th. That's in a little more than a month from now. Watch this announcement he made on Instagram about it this week.

JEFF BEZOS: You see the Earth from space, and it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It's one Earth. I want to go on this flight because it's a thing I've wanted to do all my life. It's an adventure. It's a big deal for me.

- I want to bring in Ariel Ekblaw, founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Ariel, you have a business relationship with Jeff Bezos's rocket company, Blue Origin. How involved have you been with the exact rocket Jeff Bezos plans to fly to space in, and have you been inside it or is there a replica?

ARIEL EKBLAW: Thank you for having me. So yes, at MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, we've had the pleasure of flying research payloads on New Shepherd. This is a suborbital rocket, so it goes up, makes about a three minute or so coasting period of microgravity, and then returns to the surface of the Earth. And we have had an opportunity to install experiments and be able to get data back from the same chamber, a similar chamber to what will now, as we're all excitedly watching, be ferrying Jeff Bezos and a few other human space tourists up into suborbital space tourism, for the first time. July 20th.

- And Ariel, is Blue Origin ready to carry Jeff Bezos on that first human flight to space?

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ARIEL EKBLAW: So to my knowledge, they've done over a dozen-- now I think it might be close to 15, but don't quote me on that exact number-- flights with New Shepherd. So they've been developing this platform for a period of time now. And if the origin says they're ready and Jeff is ready to take that flight, we'll all be watching very excitedly and wish them all the best.

- And Ariel, you run the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, which aims to democratize access to space. What's it like to go through zero gravity simulation here on Earth? Have you done it personally? And is it kind of like being in a roller coaster in the sky?

ARIEL EKBLAW: That's a great question. And it is exactly the work that we're aiming to do with the initiative, is to help more people around the world see themselves in the future of space exploration. And one of the ways that we do that on Earth is by finding space simulation environments. And our favorite one, affectionately known as the Vomit Comet, is a plane-based experience of weightlessness.

So it's a Boeing 727, a little bit modified. And just like what you-- flying across the Atlantic, for example. And what that plane does is it does what you never want a plane to do. It pitches very steeply upward at 45 degrees, noses over, pitches very steeply downward, flies what we call a parabolic arc, and then does that arc 30 to 40 times in the sky. So yes, it's a very apt description, actually, to call it a roller coaster in the sky. And we get these beautiful moments of weightlessness, of zero gravity-- or microgravity is the more technical term-- at the top of those arcs.

- So what does it take to have a career in aerospace for people that you've convinced who want to do this with their time? Do you have to have a degree in science to be able to do this?

ARIEL EKBLAW: So it certainly helps. I do have a degree in science. I'm a scientist. But what we're trying to share with, particularly, your audience and with our community that might be listening today, is that space is changing. We're at an incredible inflection point in the space industry. We just saw Axiom, a space habitat company, raise $130 million Series B round. So space and the space industry business is no longer just tied up in satellites and data products. It's now really beginning to explore the future of human life in space. And for all the richness of human life on Earth, we will want the same diversity of roles.

We'll want the rich tapestry of what makes life so special on Earth to also be designed for in space. And that means that, yes, we need scientists and engineers like myself, still, but we also need space architects, we need space artists, space designers, space lawyers to help us deal with all of the interesting policy and legal questions that are going to arise within this next decade. So yes, a STEM degree helps. I'm always a fan of STEM. But what we like to say nowadays is STEAM. So if you're considering your career for the future, think about science, technology, engineering, art-- that's the A in STEAM-- and mathematics.

- Ariel, you said space architect. Are we really at the point where we can hire someone to design a home for people to live in in space? I mean, have we really made that much progress in space exploration since the infamous first walk on the moon by Neil Armstrong about 50 years ago?

ARIEL EKBLAW: So I would say yes. I'm very bullish on this point. And if you look at Axiom and other companies, they are planning for the first commercial space habitat in orbit in this decade. So this means NASA will no longer be running, solely, the International Space Station with all of these amazing international collaborators as a government-run space station. We will have, in addition to that, which is a commercial space station. And yes, I would say it's not too far out beyond that that we'll begin having the opportunity for space hotels of a modest size.

And then eventually, perhaps, yes, even private residences or dwellings. And this is some of the work that we are really excited to share in an upcoming book that's being released through the MIT Press called Into the Anthropocosmos. So we think of the Anthropocene as this era of human-- high human activity on the Earth. We're entering this era of extensive human activity in the cosmos. And we're really excited to see where it takes us, and our work at MIT is trying to build the artifacts of your sci-fi space future.

- Ariel, I'll be paying attention and following very closely all the new developments in space exploration. Of course, a lot of us will be watching for Jeff Bezos to actually go to space as scheduled. Ariel Ekblaw, thanks so much.

ARIEL EKBLAW: Thank you.

- All right, [? Seville. ?] Thanks so much for bringing us that conversation as a part of the latest installment of Career Control.

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What it takes to have a career in aerospace - Yahoo Finance