Space is not just a technical frontier. It's a mirror.
In Her Orbit is an ongoing essay series by Jill Hoffman examining space, emerging technology, and the deeply human questions that trail behind our most ambitious ideas. Not technical reporting. Not trend chasing. Something harder and more interesting — an attempt to understand what we reveal about ourselves when we reach for things that haven't existed yet.
These essays ask what space exploration says about human ambition, power, and identity. What AI-assisted consensus does to the person in the room who is still thinking for themselves. What it means to move forward — as a species, as a leader, as an individual — when the destination isn't clear and the pressure to appear certain is highest.
This is writing for people who want to think, not just consume.
Read In Her Orbit
In Her Orbit is Jill Hoffman's platform exploring the intersection of technology and human emotion through space exploration, AI, and emerging innovation.
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Thinking Clearly While the World Speeds Up
I didn’t set out to write about the future.
I was reading an article that drew from Big Ideas 2026, a research report by ARK Investment Management, a firm known for studying long-term technological shifts rather than short-term market noise. ARK’s work isn’t about stock tips so much as pattern recognition—tracking tracking where exponential technologies are converging and what that convergence might unlock.
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The Idea That Wanted to Teach the World to Fly
Autonomy is rising. eVTOLs are coming. But the biggest challenge in aviation hasn’t changed.
I grew up in a world where flying wasn’t a hobby; it was a heritage. Airplanes on the ramp. Experiments in the hangar. Stories of impossible flights told around the dinner table. Aviation, in my family, wasn’t mythology. It was
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The Wrong Stuff, Revisited: Why Space Still Hits a Nerve
What a viral post taught me about space, storytelling, and who gets to belong in the stars.
A few days ago, I wrote a short blog post called “The Wrong Stuff.” It was a reflection on a recent all-women Blue Origin suborbital launch—not a critique of the passengers, but of the way it was framed and sold to the public.
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The Future of Work: AI, Space, and the End of Business as Usual
Depending on who you ask, the future of work is either a utopia of infinite leisure or a dystopia where AI takes all the jobs and humans are left writing poetry for food. Some think automation will free us from the grind, while others fear it’ll strip us of purpose. Then there’s the space crowd, arguing that the real workplace revolution is happening on the Moon.
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How the Next Generation of Pilots Will Be More Than Just Human
Aviation has been built on a balance of skill, intuition, and experience for over a century. Pilots train for years, logging countless hours in the cockpit to master their craft. But the next generation of pilots? They won’t all be human. And even the human ones? They won’t train the same way their predecessors did.
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Are We Ready for an AI-Powered Future? Spoiler: Our Energy Supply Isn't
So, Trump dropped a bombshell recently. No, it's not another reality TV cameo but an announcement about Stargate, a massive AI investment that he claims will revolutionize technology. But here's the twist: while hyping up the future of AI, he casually dropped a little line about how the United States doesn't have enough energy to power it.
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Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg… and the President? The Real Power Behind Space and Tech
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, three of the most influential and polarizing figures in modern industry, seated alongside President Trump’s newly chosen cabinet at his inauguration. For some, this moment screams progress: a partnership between government and innovation, …
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Why You Should Care About Space When Earth Is Burning
I was sitting in Washington, D.C., scrolling through the news, when I saw the images of wildfires tearing through California. Even from 3,000 miles away, the devastation felt personal—because Los Angeles is my hometown. Seeing those skies filled with smoke and knowing the toll on lives, homes, and communities broke my heart. It reminded me of the tragedy in Maui just months earlier.
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What If NASA Was Privatized? A Look at the Possibilities
If you’re an entrepreneur like me, you’ve probably noticed something pretty fascinating about the space industry lately: it’s buzzing with innovation. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab aren’t just tinkering with cool ideas—they’re doing the stuff we used to think only governments could pull off. Launching rockets, building reusable spacecraft, planning Mars colonies… it’s wild.
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Your GPS and Why You Should Care About Space Trash
One day, while waiting to get off a plane in D.C., trying to distract my thoughts from judging what people leave behind, my brain wondered all on its own about what happened to all the trash in space. The result was many sleepless nights, a mistaken idea to rewatch the movie "Gravity," and a lot of learning about what happens to all the stuff people worldwide have been launching …
The biggest questions of our time aren't technical. They're human. In Her Orbit is where Jill Hoffman thinks through them out loud.