Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides is a public speaker, co-creator of Yuri's Night, and an author on space exploration. She accumulated over five hours of weightless time as a Flight Director for Zero-G Corporation, and plans to travel to space as a "Founder Astronaut" on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo with her husband George T. Whitesides. [1]

Ms. Whitesides received a bachelor's degree in biology from Stanford and a master's from Caltech[2], with a particular interest in astrobiology. In relation to that work she appeared in the 3D IMAX documentary "Aliens of the Deep"[3] alongside director James Cameron traveling to hydrothermal vents two miles under the ocean. She has also visited Haughton impact crater in the arctic to study plants surviving in extreme environments. [4]

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