Jill (Rutan) Hoffman

🚀 Exciting Announcement: My New Book Launch! 📚 I am thrilled to share some exciting news with you all – my latest book, “How to Build an Airplane in Your Living Room: A Guide to Living an Unconventional Life a.co/d/cXIefem is finally here!

“While spacewalking I realized something, I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.” ― Artemis II Astronaut Reid Wiseman

TIME’s new cover: SpaceX is racing to build its most powerful rockets yet with the goal of returning humans to the moon. Gwynne Shotwell is leading the charge alongside Elon Musk. Read it here: time.com/article/2026/0…

Honestly heartbroken. I love my Model X! I really thought it was the last car model I’d ever buy. Turns out the future might not include car ownership at all. Didn’t expect this kind of goodbye. 💔 apple.news/AWzflxZnwSTayA…

“Self-driving cars are often pitched as the ultimate terrestrial technology. In reality, they are space-age machines. Until we master the environment 300 kilometers up — on par with the roads themselves, the cost of driving down here will remain stuck in orbit.”

“2026 Isn’t a Reset. It’s a Trajectory” by Hello Jill Hoffman @hellojillhoffman/2026-isnt-a-reset-it-s-a-trajectory-79fa64b3c20e" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@hellojillhoff…

At his confirmation hearing, NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman didn’t offer a polite, ceremonial introduction. He walked in with something else entirely, a warning wrapped in ambition. medium.com/in-her-orbit/w…

I’m the only one in my family still flying —and the irony is, aviation has never needed more people in the sky. That realization hit me recently as I revisited Path 2 Flight, the company I built in 2015 to make flying accessible to everyone. Back then, people told me I was early. Today, the data tells me I was right. Pilot shortage? It’s not just real — it’s shifted into entirely new roles: remote operators, eVTOL pilots, system supervisors, and aerospace specialists. We’re entering a future where autonomy doesn’t replace pilots — it multiplies the kinds of pilots we need. I wrote a piece on what happened, what changed, and why the mission isn’t over. 👇 hellojillhoffman.com/blog-2-1/revis…

@hatdrummer1 No it wasn’t

@LookingSkyward I trust that Voyager was there..

Walked through the remodeled Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum today. Honestly, the only remodel it reminds me of is Cracker Barrel’s

Sometimes the hardest thing isn’t knowing what I believe, it’s deciding whether I dare to say it. People around me freely share their political opinions, assuming I agree. I usually stay quiet. My views lean conservative, and I know that if I voiced them, they’d likely be met with hostility, not curiosity. The word “conservative” itself has become less a description than a trigger. My solution, for now, has been silence. But silence sits hard with me. My father and husband both served in the military to protect and defend the Constitution, which guarantees, among other things, freedom of speech. Not just speech that’s popular or fashionable, but speech for everyone. And yet here I am, censoring myself in the very country they served to defend. The irony is that I’m not close-minded. I love to read, debate, and learn from people who view the world from different perspectives. But too often, difference now feels dangerous. Words that, to me, sound like common sense are, to others, evidence of hate. And once that assumption is made, dialogue ends before it even begins. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write about this in The Coddling of the American Mind. They call it one of the “Great Untruths”: the idea that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Once that mindset takes hold, disagreement itself becomes proof of wickedness. A different perspective isn’t just wrong, it’s immoral. And when we start to believe that, words lose their power to persuade. They become weapons, and every conversation becomes war. Some will say the reason I hesitate to speak is because I know my views are hateful. But that’s not true. What I feel isn’t hate, it’s conviction, shaped by my upbringing, my values, and my concern for fairness. I believe disagreement should sharpen us, not destroy us. Yet today, disagreement is often rebranded as cruelty. That’s why so many of us stay quiet: not because we’re ashamed, but because we’re tired of being told that every difference of opinion must come from a place of malice. It doesn’t. Sometimes it comes from a different reading of the same problem, or a different hope for what society could be. But silence has a cost. If enough of us decide it’s safer to say nothing, the public square empties. Our democracy becomes less about persuasion and more about dominance. Dialogue, the very process that allows free people to grow together despite their differences, disappears. And maybe that’s the most dangerous silence of all. The downfall of humanity will not come because we disagreed. It will come if we decide that disagreement itself is hate, and leave the conversation altogether.

This is what winning in life really looks like 🧵 1.

Sometimes giving up isn’t the end of the story it’s the start of something better. I was honored to be featured in this episode of Freakonomics, where we explore the quiet ache of quitting. It’s an episode about what we lose, what we learn, and how we keep moving forward. If you’ve ever wrestled with when to walk away, or how to rebuild after, you’ll want to give this a listen.

This is long overdue. I grew up in a family where flying wasn’t just a career it was a calling. I’ve worked in and around aerospace, watching firsthand how innovation outpaced the very system meant to keep our skies safe. So hearing this now, an announcement to overhaul air traffic control by 2028, I can’t help but wonder: why has it taken this long? We’ve had the talent, the tools, and the need for decades. Yes, modernization is essential. But let’s make sure we’re not just playing catch-up. Let’s build something worthy of the next generation of pilots, passengers, and pioneers

RIGHT NOW: President Donald Trump calls into Dept. of Transportation announcement to overhaul U.S. air traffic control system by 2028. "We're going to do a great system," Trump says as Sec. Sean Duffy holds speakerphone to mic. "It has to be brought up to a modern standard."

The Strange Case of Hating the Hand That Built Your Car There’s a special kind of absurdity in slapping an anti-Elon Musk sticker onto the back of your Tesla. A little circle-and-slash through his name, or a passive-aggressive “I bought this before I knew” bumper sticker — as if that somehow clears the ledger. It’s like ordering a steak and then protesting the cattle ranger. It’s not about being pro-Elon or anti-Elon — frankly, at this point, he’s transcended being a person and become more of a weather pattern. But the mental gymnastics it takes to rationalize driving around in the product of a company the guy willed into existence, while simultaneously trying to distance yourself from him, is fascinating. People are complicated. Brands are complicated. But maybe — just maybe — it’s okay to acknowledge that your car doesn’t have to share your politics. It can just be a good car. Or a bad one. Either way, pretending you can surgically remove Musk from Tesla is like trying to unbake the eggs from a cake. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to like anything. But if you’re driving a Tesla, you’re benefiting from the crazy. No amount of vinyl decals is going to change that.

“The Wrong Stuff, Revisited: Why Space Still Hits a Nerve” by Hello Jill Hoffman @hellojillhoffman/the-wrong-stuff-revisited-why-space-still-hits-a-nerve-36cef6549182" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@hellojillhoff…

The Wrong Stuff We used to build things that made you stop and stare. Rockets that cracked the sky open. Machines with soul. Crews with swagger. There was a time you knew the names of the people flying those missions—Yeager, Glenn, Armstrong. The kind of folks who didn’t just have the right stuff, they defined it. Space used to mean risk. It used to mean purpose. It used to mean something bigger than the people strapped in. Now? I’m not so sure. I watched the recent all-women Blue Origin launch with what I wish had been pride. The headlines were polished. The Instagram moments were ready. And yes, it’s worth celebrating women in space—always has been. The problem is, this wasn’t really space. And these weren’t astronauts in any meaningful sense of the word. They went up, they came down. Eleven minutes, round trip. Barely kissed the edge of space. And while the coverage played like history in the making, it felt more like a very expensive amusement park ride, with matching jumpsuits and a lot of self-congratulation. This isn’t about gender. It’s about gravity—literal and metaphorical. We’ve lost it. We’ve traded exploration for exposure. Discipline for marketing. The right stuff for the right optics. Call me old-fashioned, but if you’re going to ride a rocket, you should have trained for it. You should understand the systems, know the risk, have earned the patch. Otherwise, it’s not a mission—it’s a moment. And moments fade. Space flight used to demand something of us. Courage, yes. But also competence. Commitment. A reason to be there beyond proving we could. I miss that. I miss when it wasn’t just about who went up, but why. Because space deserves better than a joyride, no matter who’s on board.

People are incredibly creative in transforming a wrecked Rutan Long-EZ into a one-of-a-kind street-legal custom car! Waste not, want not! @autoevolution

My first question, “Is it manned?” With further research, I learned that the F-47 is a manned aircraft. It has an integration with autonomous drones, which reflects a strategic move toward combining human decision-making with artificial intelligence. This approach leverages the strengths of both manned and unmanned systems to achieve air superiority in contested environments. So with that, maybe the age of the fighter pilot isn't over just yet.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. A news story broke there's massive structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre, something far beyond the tech level assumed of ancient Egyptians. What can back these claims? Extraordinary technology: Synthetic Aperture Radar🧵