Despite having no official astrophysics or engineering background, Ariel Waldman knew she wanted to be involved in putting men and women into space and so she went about opening space up to the whole planet through space hacking.

Waldman’s interest in space came from a spark of inspiration after watching the documentary in 2008 called When We Left Earth, which spoke to the original NASA engineers who were part of teams that would go down in history as putting the first human beings into space and back again.

Watching it, Waldman was so affected by the efforts of these space pioneers that she decided that, despite her having no background in engineering or astrophysics, she wanted to be able to help NASA out in any way possible.