Barbara Schloss has the coolest internship working for Virgin Galactic

FETCHING coffee and photocopying? Forget about it. This intern has the coolest internship in this world, or any other.

MEET Barbara Schloss. When she was 11-years old, her ‘space geek’ parents took her and her brother to the Mojave Desert in California to watch a space race in which a privately developed spacecraft broke a world record.

Ten years later, Ms Schloss is an aerospace engineering student at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But more interestingly, she’s now an intern at Virgin Galactic where she works on the liquid propulsion system for LauncherOne — a launch vehicle for satellites.

Barbara Schloss’ internship is working with rockets. Source: LinkedIn.

If you don’t know what a liquid propulsion system is, just know that it’s heady, important stuff.

Virgin Galactic is Richard Branson’s attempt to conquer space. It is developing commercial spacecraft which, for a fee, will take tourists up to suborbital space. But it won’t come cheap; a single flight will cost you at least $250,000.

According to Ms Schloss’ LinkedIn profile, she’s also been an intern at Draper Laboratory, where she worked on projects including modelling the lunar surface, and in the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA. Not quite the coffee fetching tasks characteristic of most internships.

Virgin boss Richard Branson singled out Ms Schloss in his latest Influencer post on LinkedIn in an article about encouraging children to shoot for the moon, literally.

Richard Branson wants kids to shoot for the moon.

He wrote: “Children are sponges; they absorb what we say and do. Our actions and words can greatly influence and inspire their young minds, and ultimately their future.

“By exposing her the XPRIZE [the space race Ms Schloss witnessed at 11] — a prize that encourages radical breakthroughs for the benefits of humanity — Barbara’s parents unknowingly sparked her life’s passion. Barbara claims to have enjoyed maths and science before she can remember, but on that day, she set her sights on becoming an aerospace engineer.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for dreamers — not those who waste their time thinking ‘what if’ but the ones who look to the sky and say ‘why can’t I shoot for the moon?’”