Beth Moses
Astronaut, Chief Astronaut Instructor
Virgin Galactic
Beth Moses is a professional astronaut and the Chief Astronaut Instructor at Virgin Galactic. In 2019, she served as the sole mission specialist on Virgin Galactic’s test flight VF01 where she conducted the first engineering evaluation of the passenger systems and cabin dynamics of SpaceShipTwo. Moses is the first female to fly to space on a commercial vehicle and earned her Commercial Astronaut Wings from the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2019.
During her cabin test on VF01, Moses became the first astronaut in history to unstrap and float freely in a suborbital spacecraft. She was also the first test passenger ever flown above Mach 3 in a commercial transport vehicle. Moses is the 571st human in space and the 63rd woman. As the Chief Astronaut Instructor, she will use that experience to prepare other staff, tourists, and researchers to fly in the cabin of SpaceShipTwo.
Moses was formerly the Extravehicular Activity System Manager for the International Space Station at NASA.
Moses received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue. As a student, she was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Microgravity Research Award to conduct materials research in parabolic flight. She is the recipient of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium annual Women in Space Science Award and a former Google Science Fair judge. She was honored as an Outstanding Aerospace Engineer by AAE in 2018.