Loretta Whitesides
- Co-Founder of Yuri's Night
Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides is the author of “The New Right Stuff: Using Space to Bring Out the Best in You,” a Founder Astronaut at Virgin Galactic, and the founder of SpaceKind Training (which she led in-house at Virgin Galactic for five years).
Loretta studied astrobiology at Stanford and Caltech, did research on plant life in the Arctic with NASA, dove to the bottom of the ocean with Director James Cameron to film the IMAX movie “Aliens of the Deep,” and has floated weightless hundreds of times as crew for Zero Gravity Corporation. She is also the co-founder of Yuri’s Night, which celebrates the power of space to bring the world together on or around April 12 each year.