Career Interview Series: Sarah Lipscy on her non-academic career path in astronomy

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

When Sarah Lipscy attends an AAS meeting, she needs an hour to get to each session. She might only be crossing the hall, but the five or ten-minute conversations she has with other attendees on the way light her up. “It’s one of my favorite meetings because I’m an astronomer by training. That’s my people,” Lipscy says. 

As the Director of Business Winning and International Business Development within the Space and Mission Systems sector at BAE Systems, Inc., Lipscy spends much of her day with engineers and business partners. When she has the chance to be with other astronomers, she takes the opportunity to chat, even if that means a five-minute walk takes an hour.

Lipscy has carved an interesting career path inside the business of space. Her interest in astronomy came accidentally through a summer course at the University of Colorado Boulder. She signed up for a creative writing course but found out she’d been assigned to an astronomy class instead. That random assignment turned out to be life-changing. 

Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Lipscy

At the end of the six-week course, she met with the professor, who asked what degree she wanted to pursue. Lipscy grew up in Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered. Many of her classmates had parents working as chemists; she assumed she would follow that idea and become a chemist, too. When she responded with chemistry, her advisor shook his head. 

“No, no, no, no. You should study physics. That’s the basis of everything, and you should get a minor in astronomy.” 

That is just what Lipscy did at CU Boulder. Then she pursued graduate school and got her PhD in astronomy and physics from UCLA. Once she was nearly finished with her academic studies, Lipscy found herself once again in her advisor’s office, this time at UCLA. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her degrees, but she was certain of what she didn’t want—a career in academia.

“I don’t want to be a professor,” she told her advisor. “That’s great,” he said, without missing a beat. “Let’s see what else you can do.” 

They used Yahoo jobs, popular at the time, to insert all of Lipscy’s skills, including IDL (Interactive Data Language) coding. Los Angeles hosts a number of large aerospace companies, including Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. Lipscy had the opportunity to work at all of them, but on a visit to Colorado, a friend who worked at Ball Aerospace encouraged her to apply. 

Lipscy landed a job quickly at Ball as a systems engineer and early on worked almost exclusively on Earth remote sensing programs. Instead of studying the stars, Lipscy found herself looking back at Earth, doing Earth imaging and atmospheric chemistry measurements. 

“But photons are photons, and so it was fine for me to do spectroscopy of the Earth instead of stellar atmospheres,” Lipscy said. She worked her way through various programs at Ball, picking up new skills when the chance came up. She worked her way up from systems engineer to team lead and eventually to business development director . Along the way, she got to participate in some great projects, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. BAE Systems built the Wide Field Instrument for Roman, a project Lipscy is proud of. 

Sarah Lipscy at Gemini South
Photo: Sarah Lipscy

BAE Systems, Great Britain’s largest aerospace company, acquired Ball Aerospace in 2024, and Lipscy transitioned from a relatively small aerospace company (~5,000 employees) to a segment within a huge international company, as the Space and Missions Systems segment is part of the American BAE Systems, Inc. portion of the company. Lipscy’s new role involves much more work within the extended company. She’s also learning, twenty-one years into her career, how to work and maneuver in such a large company. 

Part of business development for Lipscy has always been meeting with customers and partners, who include various portions of the US government. With BAE Systems, clients are now on the international side as well. In January, she attended a Middle Eastern space conference in Oman, where she met potential partners and customers from that sphere. One of the challenges in her role is assessing international clients and what BAE Systems can expect as they work together. This could mean having an enthusiastic client with little funding from their government for missions, or understanding cultural differences down to when a meeting should be held and who should sit across from whom at the table. 

“The rest of BAE does a lot of international business, so I'll be leveraging a lot of the policies and practices that they have, and then, of course, tailoring them to how they need to work for BAE SMS,” Lipscy said. 

When Lipscy first joined Ball Aerospace, she understood astronomy, but she had to learn on the job the nuances of being in business in the private sector. One of her best pieces of advice for anyone who is thinking of taking their astronomy or STEM degree outside of academia is to find ways to learn about business practices. 

“The thing that PhD school does not teach you is anything really about business: how businesses think about things and how businesses make money and how they value people's time and resources…that's just very disparate from what you get in academia. If you're in graduate school and you're thinking about industry, think about ways to bulk up your resume in business acumen methods.”

“I think that's been really critical, and I won't say I've struggled with that, but it's certainly not something that comes naturally to me as a scientist,” Lipscy added. She acknowledged that her career path isn’t necessarily repeatable, but it is an example of finding and enjoying a career rooted in space outside of academia.

For students who are on the fence about grad school or anyone considering leaving academia for the industry, Lipscy says, “My advice is, if you think there's a chance you want to be in academia in five years, try it. I think it's hard to leave academia and then go back, but it's not hard to stay in academia and do a postdoc or two and then transition to industry.

I think the world's changed, and I think there's a place for everyone. And I think that if you are motivated and interesting, you'll do really well in industry.”

Sarah Lipscy with the rocket that carried Landsat-9 to orbit.
Lipscy's team built the camera for Landsat-9.