Hillary Coe had a relatively normal career in advertising—until she took a sharp turn toward outer space. After serving as a creative at agencies including The Famous Group and TBWA/Chiat/Day L.A, and then internally at Google, the self-professed space fanatic found herself pursuing her dream job, sitting face-to-face with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. 

After serendipitously landing a meeting through contacts at XPrize, Coe told Musk that he had a huge design challenge—and opportunity—on his hands. “You’re about to embark on redefining how we see space in the 21st century,” she said. “What are you planning to tell the world to continue to get funding and government sponsorship for your human space program?” After showing Musk her portfolio and her ideas for branding SpaceX—from identity to interfaces for the company's vessels—he appointed her its first director of design. After three and a half years in that gig, she’s now bringing her cosmonautically inclined skills to her job as principal, experience at AKQA, where she continues to work with SpaceX and a host of other space-centered firms. 

Today, Coe's role in designing for the final frontier continues to send her to bizarre places—one recent project during the pandemic had her sequestered in a Martian analogue atop a Hawaiian volcano, charting human experience design for life on other planets. And it's only a matter of time before she crosses the Kármán Line herself.

What advice would you give your younger self? 

I would say [that] being an engineer working in space, which I was obsessed with as a kid, is not just for boys. Just because you're a weird little artist doesn't mean that you don't have a place in the stars.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? 

The morning before my interview with Elon. I don't know how I ended up with the courage to walk into that office and sit down in that chair and believe in myself. But I was going to shoot my shot, and what's the worst that can happen? I get kicked out and asked to leave his office. But oh, god, the sheer terror! We all, especially as creatives, have imposter syndrome, [but it’s about] giving yourself permission to do the scary thing. That was one of the greatest decisions I made in my life, to get in that car, and to drive to that office where nobody does the thing you do, nobody really looks like you. You walk into that office with a smile on your face, with your laptop under your arm, because you're damn well about to convince one of the most powerful men in the world that you belong at that table and that he should create a role for you.

If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why? 

I might go back to MIT and study astronomics and help build the next commercial space station tomorrow, like, just get down and dirty. The only thing that's gonna get me to leave this empire of space creatives would be to build a habitat I would live on as an astronaut.

What should the industry do to encourage more women and people of color into its ranks? 

My hope is that we [women] could be put more in the spotlight not for our own, selfish means, but to be an example for [other] artists, for women, for women of color, for transgender individuals. I think that it’s important for people to give themselves permission to think different, to try and disrupt an industry they’re passionate about. The reason I was at SpaceX is not because I was telling Elon Musk how many great things he was doing. I was inspired by all of the things I saw that were wrong, that I was uniquely qualified to help him with. The only way we're going to crack that code is if more people are disruptors and troublemakers and say, “Hey, this sucks. And I am uniquely qualified to fix it if you let me.”

What is the biggest lesson you have taken away from the pandemic?

I feel like we were in our own space simulation during the pandemic. A lot of us were guilty of losing that human component, that human connection to things like nature and other people and the things that we are primally programmed to need. You don't have that in space, so it was a great parallel to see if we were to leave [the earth what] we would all miss. I think the pandemic was a great petri dish for understanding what happens when you remove a lot of those needs and desires for thriving as a human being.