JUPITER — On the second anniversary of Jupiter native Kellie Gerardi making the trip to space, the town has seen fit for all to celebrate, declaring Nov. 2 “Kellie Gerardi Day.”
Gerardi was the 90th woman to visit space, and “carried the spirit of her hometown into space” and is an inspiration to other Jupiter residents,” Mayor Jim Kuretski said during the Oct. 21 town council meeting, where the council made its official declaration.
“This, more than anything, any other accolade, makes me feel proud as a Jupiter native,” Gerardi said during the meeting. “When my mom was growing up, women were not yet eligible in the United States to fly to space, but one single generation later, she watched her daughter reach the stars and she’s watching her granddaughter take it completely for granted, which is so wonderful.”
Read The Palm Beach Post’s profile about Gerardi, originally published on March 13, 2025, here:
Twenty years ago, Kellie Gerardi would stare up at the sky from a field in Jupiter, trying to catch a glimpse of rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and quietly wishing she could go to space herself.
Today, it’s more than a wish. It’s her dream job.
The self-described science geek is an astronaut, one who first touched the sky in 2023 and is ready to return in 2026 as a payload specialist with Virgin Galactic.
Her first trip made her the 90th woman to visit space and, to her neighbors, the astronaut next door, one who picks her 7-year-old daughter up from school and still smiles at her “Star Wars”-themed wedding photos with her husband. She jokes that its spirit was “ ‘Til Mars Do Us Part.”
“It felt so special to see human beings leave the planet,” said Gerardi, now 36, remembering her teenage, video-game-playing self. “It later blossomed into, ‘I want to be a part of that.’ ”
And she became part of that in her own way. When she got home, she posted a clip on Instagram of herself looking out of the spacecraft’s window, whispering ‘Hi, Delta,” to her daughter Delta Victoria — named after the Delta-V symbol used in spaceflight dynamics — on Earth below.
The post went viral, and in that moment, one thought ran through her mind — that she was no longer on the same planet as her daughter, who was 5 years old at the time.
“It was an intense feeling being a part of (Earth) and so attached, but slightly outside of it,” Gerardi said. “It was beautiful and it wasn’t scary.”
Today, more than 1 million people follow her Instagram account. An astronaut with a lip piercing and who wears friendship bracelets is showing them all that STEM and femininity can co-exist.
Gerardi is preparing for her second space flight — this time, with an all-female crew set to blast off from New Mexico. Gerardi is excited about the potential for the commercial spaceflight industry, which could open space to creatives and scientists alike.
“Science and sparkle and space and sisterhood are all compatible themes,” said Gerardi in a bright blue cardigan dotted with stars — one of her many space-themed pieces. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”
From Jupiter to the stars: Kellie Gerardi’s path to becoming an astronaut
Gerardi goes to space as a citizen-scientist, a position that shows how far U.S. space efforts have evolved since their earliest days.
The first U.S. astronauts came from the military and often were fighter pilots. The first science experiment in space happened on May 24, 1962, conducted by Malcolm Scott Carpenter aboard Mercury-Atlas 7. The first all-civilian crew launched in 2021, and Gerardi was the first industry-sponsored researcher to fly on a commercial spacecraft.
Gerardi didn’t even know at first that she was on this path to the stars. She caught one of her first glimpses of it in, of all places, a coat room in New York City. The Jupiter High grad, was studying science and communications at Barnard College and New York University.
Her introduction to The Explorers Club, a professional society that promotes scientific exploration, took place at a charity dinner.
Her date was Steven Baumruk, who she married in 2015. As they ate, she felt like she finally found people as passionate about discovery as she was. She wanted to be involved in any way she could until she was able to join as a member.
So she took a job as the club’s coat-check attendant. As Gerardi puts it, “There is no job too small.”
“I was good at it,” Gerardi said. “I had a system. I remembered faces and whose coat was whose.”
Club members noticed her attention to detail and gave her career advice. She soon became a member and worked her way through the club’s ranks to join its board of directors in 2020. She served on the board for three years until 2023.
She became the youngest person to chair the club’s annual dinner in 2014, which featured a speech by the British cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking that saw billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in attendance. She even visited Hawking at his office in Cambridge and wrote a chapter of his children’s book “George and The Blue Moon” alongside his daughter, Lucy Hawking.
After graduation, connections at The Explorers Club helped her chart a course in the space industry. She promoted commercial spaceflight with the nonprofit Commercial Spaceflight Federation in New York City and Washington, D.C. In 2014, she welded rocket hardware for aerospace manufacturer Masten Space Systems in Mojave, California, near Edwards Air Force Base and 100 miles north of Los Angeles.
She took a crucial step toward space flight after studying bioastronautics in 2016 with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, where she led microgravity research flight campaigns as an instructor.
The research institute, a hub of citizen-science, performed its first science mission with Virgin Galactic in 2023 to do health care and fluid research in space. It named Gerardi as its first payload specialist.
In one experiment from her 2023 flight, Gerardi wore a glucose monitor on her arm to see how space affects insulin resistance. Her upcoming mission will expand on her past flight’s research, which also looked at how liquid behaves in space.
The institute chose to send Gerardi to space partly because she had years of experience taking microgravity flights, which is when a plane takes a rollercoaster profile and its passengers experience weightlessness for about 20 seconds.
Gerardi has a “stomach of steel.” She says she has never once felt nauseous in microgravity, and she feels grounded in it — she doesn’t flail her legs and moves around safely. Before going to space, she choreographs each movement she plans to make in the spacecraft and practices it repeatedly.
On her first trip, the only pain she felt was cheek soreness because she smiled so much. She likened it to her wedding day.
‘What happens if you bump into a planet?’: Kellie Gerardi, daughter talk space travel
While on Earth, Gerardi’s interests are as wide as the horizon.
She has a knack for upcycling home decor, and she designs her own space-themed dresses. Gerardi loves Taylor Swift and saw her perform on the Eras Tour in Miami Gardens. At the concert, she passed out friendship bracelets she made — each with at least one bead that went up to space with her.
She is also a lifelong gamer. Video game controllers sprinkle her living room. These days, Gerardi mostly plays Mario Kart and Mario Party with her daughter.
She shares her life on Instagram to show other women that they don’t have to choose just one focus in life. She even has shared her hopes of having another child.
“I find it so heartwarming and humbling when people come up and say ‘Hi,’ “ said Gerardi, who moved back to Jupiter in 2020 to be closer to her family. “I am shocked by it every time.”
A week after her first space flight, she threw a night-at-the-museum birthday party at the Cox Science Center in West Palm Beach for Delta, who was turning 6.
One challenge Gerardi has faced as a mom-astronaut is learning how to put space flight into kid-friendly terms. A guidebook on that does not exist, but Gerardi did write a children’s book series featuring a girly-girl astronaut to normalize the situation a little more.
She has taken Delta on a space-flight simulator, but the most personal revelations have come during pillow talks at bedtime, when Delta has asked questions like, “Have they flown that spaceship before?” and “What happens if you bump into a planet?”
“After my space flight, she walked a little taller into kindergarten,” Gerardi said with a smirk.
Seeing the crest of earth from the spacecraft window has changed the way Gerardi thinks about life. She hopes people realize “how lucky we are and how fragile this is.”
Gerardi doesn’t know if she will get to visit space again after her upcoming trip. Her legacy may be laying a breadcrumb trail that leads to space so other girls like her — and her daughter — can follow it if they choose.
“If you were to ask me to close my eyes and picture an astronaut, I’m not picturing someone who looks like me, and I’ve been (to space),” Gerardi said. “But if you ask my daughter to draw an astronaut, she’s drawing a girl.”
Maya Washburn covers northern Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida-Network. Reach her at mwashburn@pbpost.com. Support local journalism: Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Town honor Jupiter native, woman astronaut. Nov. 2 is Kellie Gerardi Day
Reporting by Maya Washburn, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
