The guest on episode 17 of the Tech Outlook podcast is Las Cruces resident Jamila Gilbert, the internal communications lead for Virgin Galactic, became an astronaut in August 2023 when she flew on Virgin Galactic’s spaceship Unity. It’s a day she’ll never forget. With turquoise in her pockets, Gilbert floated weightlessly in a rocketship cabin while looking at “the most brilliant crystalline entity” she’s ever seen. One of the first things she did when she got back home was lock herself in her art studio with the darkest paint on Earth to illustrate what she’d seen in space.