The Orion nebula can be seen in this long-exposure photograph of the night sky above Navajo Volcanic Field in northwest New Mexico taken by Dheera Venkatraman, a principal applied scientist in machine learning and AI at Amazon's AWS. Credit: Dheera Venkatraman via Flickr

Charlie Hurley spent most of his career in college athletics. Before applying for a Spaceport America public information officer job, the former New Mexico State assistant athletics director considered the idea carefully.

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Debra Werner is a correspondent for SpaceNews based in San Francisco. Debra earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is a recipient...