{"id":80946,"date":"2018-07-26T06:42:21","date_gmt":"2018-07-26T13:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/ion-engine-startup-wants-to-change-the-economics-of-earth-orbit"},"modified":"2018-07-26T06:42:21","modified_gmt":"2018-07-26T13:42:21","slug":"ion-engine-startup-wants-to-change-the-economics-of-earth-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/ion-engine-startup-wants-to-change-the-economics-of-earth-orbit","title":{"rendered":"Ion Engine Startup Wants to Change the Economics of Earth Orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For as long as she can remember, she\u2019s puzzled over what\u2019s out there. As a kid drifting off to sleep on a trampoline outside her family\u2019s home near Portland, Ore., she would track the International Space Station. She remembers cobbling together a preteen version of the Drake Equation on those nights and realizing that the likelihood of intelligent alien life was something greater than zero. Star Trek<\/em> marathons with her father catalyzed her cosmic thinking, as did her mother\u2019s unexpected death when Bailey was 8. The house lost some of its order\u2014some of its gravity\u2014which led to more nights gazing skyward on the trampoline.<\/p>\n

In college, Bailey got a hard-won paid internship at the now-merged aerospace giant Hamilton Sundstrand and joined a team repairing turbine engines. She hated it. \u201cIt was the opposite of pushing the envelope,\u201d she says. \u201cNothing new ever went into that building. Nothing new ever left that building.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time she set off to get a master\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering at Duke University, the idea of logging 30 years at a place like Boeing Cor NASA had lost all appeal. She tried her hand at finance and later law, and was unlucky enough to excel at both. \u201cI made it pretty far down that path, but then I thought, Wait, if I become a lawyer, then I\u2019m a lawyer and that\u2019s what I do,\u201d she recalls. \u201cWhat if I don\u2019t want to do that on Tuesdays?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For as long as she can remember, she\u2019s puzzled over what\u2019s out there. As a kid drifting off to sleep on a trampoline outside her family\u2019s home near Portland, Ore., she would track the International Space Station. She remembers cobbling together a preteen version of the Drake Equation on those nights and realizing that the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,39,38,45,15,41,1496],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-economics","category-engineering","category-finance","category-habitats","category-information-science","category-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}