How It Started
From a sonic boom in Texas to exhibits across the Bay Area
It started during COVID lockdown in 2020. I was eleven years old, and my dad was watching SpaceX's Starship prototypes launch and crash on YouTube.
SN4, SN5, SN6, all the way through SN10. I got hooked. What began as something to watch during quarantine turned into a ritual. My dad and I would tune in for every test, every static fire, every explosive landing attempt. I started learning the engineering behind it, the physics, the failures that taught SpaceX how to succeed.
Then in April 2021, we went to Starbase, Texas. Standing in that field, watching Starship SN15 ignite, I felt the sonic boom hit my chest. The vehicle lifted off, hovered, then came back down and actually stuck the landing. It was the first time SpaceX had successfully landed a Starship prototype.
That moment changed everything. Not just because it worked, but because of what I felt standing there. Most people will never experience that. Most kids growing up in the Bay Area have no idea that humans are building ships to Mars right now, that reusable rockets are landing themselves, that space isn't just something in textbooks anymore.
I wanted other people to feel even a fraction of what I felt. So I started collecting detailed scale models of these rockets. Not toys, but museum-quality replicas with working parts, accurate paint schemes, the real deal. And then I thought: what if I could put these in places where people actually are? Not in aerospace museums two hours away, but in libraries, in neighborhoods, where a kid doing homework might look up and see Starship, Falcon Heavy, New Glenn.
That's how Galactic Getaway started. I raised $25,000, tracked down a fabricator in Russia (the models got stuck in Kazakhstan for months), convinced skeptical librarians to give a random teenager a chance, and built professional display cases with my Eagle Scout project. It's been over two years now, and we're in 14+ libraries across four counties. Kids stop and stare. Parents ask questions. Librarians tell me the space book sections are empty because kids keep checking them out.
This isn't about me being impressive. It's about making sure that the future of space exploration feels like it belongs to everyone, not just people who can afford to go to Starbase or work at SpaceX. If one kid sees these rockets and thinks "I could build that someday," then all of this was worth it.