Kiah Erlich ’10 shapes the future of space travel at Blue Origin
By Charlotte Tuggle
Kiah Erlich ’10 shapes the future of space travel at Blue Origin
By Charlotte Tuggle
A drop cap
viation management alumna Kiah Erlich ’10 used to dream of being an astronaut. Today, as Blue Origin’s head of human spaceflight sales, she makes astronauts.
“I had never thought it was achievable,” Erlich said. “When I was a kid, I looked at statistics and statistically speaking, you had less of a chance to become an astronaut than you did a rockstar. And now, I sell tickets to space.”

Like the early aviation industry, commercial space travel is still extremely exclusive. Erlich’s job is to develop relationships with the astronauts, leading them through the documentation, matching them to a flight and ensuring they’re qualified for training.

From there, Erlich hands them over to the astronaut concierge team. With the space industry expanding, careers including facilities managers, training operations teams and contract writers aren’t limited to governmental space programs anymore.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard is a fully reusable suborbital rocket system that carries six astronauts beyond the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. The vehicle is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. During flight, the only byproduct of engine combustion is water vapor, with no carbon emissions.
Prices are still high – with a price starting in the low single millions and a deposit of $150,000 – but Erlich said rockets will follow the same pattern as their airplane predecessors.

“We still have a ways to go, but it’s now becoming available to the public,” Erlich said. “That’s what’s so exciting. We’re really at the golden age of space transportation, flying humans to space, much like we were in the very beginning phases of airline travel in the aviation industry.”

Where women work to break the glass ceiling in aviation, Erlich is working to smash the glass stratosphere in the space industry.

Throughout her career in aerospace, Erlich was often one of the only women in the building. At Blue Origin, an all-woman team isn’t unusual, and Erlich helps send women astronauts to space. Notably, Blue Origin launched the first all-female flight since 1963 and has flown 13% of all women astronauts to space.

One of the keys to introducing women to the space industry is making it achievable when they’re young. Blue Origin’s female astronauts regularly speak to classes about their experience. Through the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s K-12 STEAM education nonprofit, children draw postcards picturing their vision of the future in space. Blue Origin then takes those postcards, both physical and digital, flies them on a rocket, and sends them back to children with a “Flown in Space” stamp on them.

A young girl wearing a blue Blue Origin sweatshirt holds up a drawing of a rocket labeled “Blue Origin New Shepard” against a cosmic background filled with stars and planets.
A smiling girl in a sweater holds up a tablet displaying her digital artwork of a red rocket flying through space with the sun, Earth, and moon in the background.
A young girl wearing a blue Blue Origin sweatshirt holds up a drawing of a rocket labeled “Blue Origin New Shepard” against a cosmic background filled with stars and planets.
From classroom visits to space-traveling postcards, Erlich said making the reality of space tangible to women and girls is pivotal for the future of the industry.

“There’s a lot of women on our leadership team, and we are all passionate about sending more women astronauts to space,” Erlich said. “When little girls are looking at role models and seeing what women are doing, they’re going to space, that normalizes it. It’s not rare, it’s just normal. That is my goal.”

Erlich hopes to see children grow up and go to space, and it will be their children’s children who may experience Blue Origin’s vision become reality.

Blue Origin foresees heavy industrial infrastructure move into space. With that machinery off the planet, humans will better preserve our home planet while exploring space for more resources.

Kiah Erlich wearing a blue Blue Origin jacket stands smiling with arms outstretched in front of a large Blue Origin rocket booster on a landing pad under a clear blue sky.
“When you pierce through the thin blue line of the atmosphere and you’re up there looking down at this fragile little blue marble, folks come down and they’re fundamentally changed.” —Kiah Erlich ’10
Space is rich in resources, said Erlich, from collecting hydrogen for spacecraft fuel to mining the moon for water and drilling asteroids for rare minerals. But despite the abundance of space, Erlich said astronauts are amazed most by the sight of Earth.

She said it’s enough to make grown men cry and energize everyone at Blue Origin to work toward a world they won’t see for themselves.

“Blue Origin has a vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,” Erlich said. “This is a long-term vision. It exceeds our lifetimes. What we’re doing is we’re paving the road to space so that future generations can really take advantage of the road that we’ve paved, and it’s our guiding principle in everything that we do.”

In the short-term, Erlich encourages Auburn students to explore the space industry and looks forward to the day she sends an Auburn alum to space.

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