Beth Moses is an aerospace engineer and astronaut at Virgin Galactic, where she serves as the chief astronaut instructor. Her teams design and deliver the passenger cabin of SpaceShipTwo and train astronauts for their spaceflight. She is the first female to work in space as a member of the flight crew on a commercial vehicle on Virginia Galactic’s VSS Unity flight on Feb. 22, 2019 and earned her Commercial Astronaut Wings from the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2019.

Previously, Moses worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center where she served as the Extravehicular Activity System Manager for the International Space Station from design through on-orbit construction. She led the global program of human-in-the-loop testing which designed, developed, and verified the spacewalk mechanisms used to assemble and maintain the station. As a result of her contributions alongside the global team, ISS received the Robert J. Collier trophy honoring the “greatest achievement in aeronautics and astronautics in America” in 2009 for “successful design, development, and assembly of the worlds’ largest spacecraft, an orbiting laboratory, promising new discoveries for mankind and setting new standards for international co-operation in space.”

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 Google Science Fair judge. She was honored as an Outstanding Aerospace Engineer by AAE in 2018.