Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Space Explorer & Jedi Trainer

I first understood Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides at Griffith Observatory on her birthday — watching her surrender, mid-song, to a full improvisational ballet in front of a room of astronauts, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists, finishing with an elaborate curtsy that brought the house down. She hadn't wanted the fuss. Then she decided to become it.

There is a particular kind of person who makes you feel, simply by being near them, that the world is larger and more alive than you remembered. Loretta is that person. That Griffith Observatory moment captures her in a single image: someone who has done the work to know herself well enough to be, without apology, exactly who she is.

She hosts Yuri's Nights all over the world every year – the international space holiday she co-founded, a gathering where the cosmos becomes a reason for community. We share a commitment to Space for Humanity, which sends transformational leaders to space in service of a more conscious, accessible future. But what draws me to Loretta isn't only what she has built. It's what she has survived, examined, and chosen to become. Her story is one of the most honest accounts of human transformation I have encountered, and she offers it freely, because that is how she believes healing works.

Loretta describes herself as "a space explorer and a Jedi Trainer," someone who helps people "walk through their pain and trauma to harvest its gifts and fulfill what they came to Earth to do." She is based in Los Angeles, though her heart belongs to Sonoma County, redwood country in Northern California, where the river and the stars first claimed her. Her parents met at the International Club at Santa Monica City College, her father having left Cuba alone at 18, taught himself English on graveyard shifts as a factory janitor, and was later drafted to Vietnam; her mother's family arriving from El Salvador. "He did a lot so he could give my siblings and me the opportunities that we had," she says. The gratitude in that sentence becomes, as her story unfolds, the throughline of everything.

She holds science degrees from two of California's top universities, but the gift she prizes most is harder to credential: the ability to translate between people whose minds work differently, to find the metaphor that makes a complex idea suddenly inhabitable, to see which two people in a room need to find each other. "I also am fairly confident," she adds, "and don't need alcohol to dance at a party or be unabashedly who I am." It reads like a joke. It is also, quietly, a declaration of everything it took her to get there.

Loretta always knew she wanted to live in space. What she found first was community, at a childhood summer camp in Northern California, sleeping under redwoods, learning the river, discovering that belonging was possible. A counselor named Dina taught her the constellations. "They became my friends," she says, "always there for me, burning bright." She built toward the sky with the seriousness of someone who meant it. Stanford. NASA Johnson. NASA Ames. A PhD program in Astrobiology at Caltech. A proposal to the United Nations for Yuri's Night. A research expedition to the Canadian Arctic. "I was spaceward bound — clear that I was destined for the stars. Maybe I would even be the first woman to walk on the moon."

Then, eighteen months into her PhD, everything began to come apart.

She was sleep-deprived, miserable, and facing the public collapse of the very first Yuri's Night — no sponsors, no volunteers, no visible path forward. She called her NASA mentor in something close to desperation. He suggested an intensive personal training weekend. She said yes to anything. What she found there was not a strategy. It was a mirror. "Even walking on the moon wouldn't be enough to have me love myself." She saw the pressure she had been living under. She saw how resentment about money was closing doors. She saw how condescension was driving away the very people she needed.

She left her PhD program and began what she calls "a deep, decades-long journey to heal my deepest insecurities — the ones I was trying to cover up with more and more accomplishments." Indigenous traditions. Philosophy. Positive psychology. Yoga. Meditation. The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Each path had its own wisdom to contribute to me." She was not abandoning the stars. She was learning that she had to become someone worth sending there.

When Loretta was 27, she made a phone call that would quietly reorganize her entire life. She picked up the receiver and dialed her father's office from memory. She told him that at age 12, she had convinced herself he was having an affair — a misreading of an ordinary moment that had calcified, over fifteen years, into estrangement. She apologized for cutting him out of her life. He said: "Kids come up with the damnedest things." He said: "All I ever wanted was my little girl back." They went to Applebee's that Christmas and talked for three hours. "I learned he wasn't that bad after all. And that he might have just the things I was wanting to learn — like how to be warm and welcoming to all people, and how to take joy in simple things."

The reverberations were profound. Loretta had a pattern in romantic relationships: enter, eventually decide he wasn't good enough, leave. She could name the pattern. She could not break it... until she understood its source. "Once my dad was good enough, that opened up the possibility of my partner being good enough too. It was after that I asked my now-husband out on our first date." She is unambiguous about what that call made possible: "I simply would not have my marriage, my spaceflight, my amazing kids, and my kids would not have their amazing grandfather, without me doing that hard work."

For years, she had also hidden her depression. For an astronaut hopeful, she believed, it was professional suicide. She was high-performing, charismatic, skilled at keeping the interior invisible. She no longer sees it that way. "I have come to see my emotional struggles as a blessing instead of a curse. I was gifted this pain so that I would be motivated to find a path and then share that with others." She draws on Rumi -welcome and entertain them all, even if they're a crowd of sorrows- and on Dr. Gabor Maté's insight that instead of trying to feel better, we must get better at feeling. Her message to anyone in the darkness:

"Joy shared is multiplied and sorrow shared is divided. We need to get back in connection again. Not on social media, but in true connection, human to human."

Motherhood arrived like a wall. "Stunningly hard," she calls it. Then the reframe came: it is a "perfectly-designed training course from the Universe on how to be the person I have always wanted to be." Her children surface everything unfinished in her. When she gets it wrong — and she does, openly, humanly — she goes back and apologizes. And now, sometimes, they come back and apologize to her. "It's still quite astonishing to me, really. But it also gives me hope that the future can be another way." She has extended this thinking to space itself, arguing that the model for off-Earth communities should not be colonization but parenthood: nurture, support, foster independence, and release. "Kids are not a distraction. They can help train us to build the future we are inspired to create. A future that works for everyone."

Each morning, Loretta sits in meditation before eating anything — using, she admits, the motivation of hunger to make the practice non-negotiable. In that stillness, before the day takes over, she finds what she describes as "a calm knowing. Like trust. Like being still and not needing to be anywhere but just where I am. And then I hear an idea. It really feels like a gift." When the depression moves in, she no longer fights it first. She slows down, looks for the message, lets herself feel it. She reaches out. She writes. She leads. Through SpaceKind and two books, Loretta does for others what was done for her — helps them locate what is standing between them and the life they sense is possible, and walks with them through it.

Her closing words carry the full weight of everything she has earned:

"What I have learned through all of this is that I am pretty amazing. That I have the perfect flaws for my mission. That people want authentic and vulnerable connection — and that the other side is not evil. They are just people in pain, doing the best they can. Being a Jedi is about not letting anger, fear, and aggression call the shots. It's about bringing balance to the force. A healthy ecosystem needs both life and death, growth and destruction. One side is not evil and the other good. They are both critical parts of the cycle. We just need them to stay balanced."

Knowing Loretta has made me a more careful listener, a more courageous goal-setter, a faster apologizer, and a more generous forgiver. She teaches not by instruction but by example, by having done the work so visibly and so honestly that you feel, in her presence, that you might do it too.

SpaceKind: www.spacekind.org  |  Yuri's Night: www.yurisnight.net