Uber hires veteran NASA engineer Mark Moore as director of engineering for aviation as part of its Uber Elevate flying car initiative
here are 5 others Bryan Clark / The Next Web : Uber snags NASA engineer to explore the feasibility of flying taxis Shawn Knight / TechSpot : Uber hires 30-year NASA veteran to lead Elevate, its flying car initiative Charlie Nash / Breitbart : Uber Hires NASA Engineer for VTOL ‘Flying Car’ Project Stephanie Condon / ZDNet : Uber hires NASA engineer Mark Moore for its flying car initiative AJ Dellinger / International Business Times : Flying Cars: Uber Taps NASA Engineer To Help Build Flying Cars John Gruber / Daring Fireball : Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Vehicles Megan Geuss / Ars Technica : Uber hires NASA engineer to work on its flying car vision Jon Fingas / Engadget : Uber hires a NASA guru to help it understand flying cars David McCabe / Axios : Uber's flying car hire Polina Marinova / Fortune : Meet the NASA Engineer Helping Uber Figure Out Flying Cars Jillian Stampher / GeekWire : Uber's flying car project is taking off; company hires NASA engineer for Uber Elevate team George Avalos / SiliconBeat : Uber eyes flying automobiles, brings NASA veteran aboard Yoni Heisler / BGR : Uber wants to build flying cars, with the help of a top NASA engineer Tweets: Sarah Lacy / @sarahcuda : btw: Uber gave up on *cars.* this is never going to happen. but Uber still seeking to justify valuation with future vision post-china fail http://twitter.com/... Sarah Lacy / @sarahcuda : more gov't folks head to “anti gov't” uber http://twitter.com/... Janko Roettgers / @jank0 : “Quick: How are we going to get people to stop talking about #DeleteUber?” “How about... flying cars?” http://twitter.com/... Anand Sanwal / @asanwal : 15/ Revisiting the Ponzi scheme of ambition idea. Uber's TAM now includes flying cars. https://www.bloomberg.com/... (TAM = total addressable mkt)
Context & Ripple Effects
Uber's Elevate effort has been a concept without a technical leader; hiring Mark Moore, a 30-year NASA veteran of VTOL research, puts a named engineer at the top of the aviation org and gives the flying-taxi pitch an credibility anchor beyond press releases. The move reads as deliberate groundwork rather than a one-off hire — months later Uber formalized a partnership with NASA on Elevate and set a Los Angeles aerial-taxi target for 2020.
The hire also lands while Uber's other frontier bet is wobbling: reporting on the self-driving unit's slow progress and post-Otto talent exodus shows how hard it is for the company to hold specialized engineering teams, which makes retaining Moore a test case for whether Elevate avoids the same fate.
First-order effects
- Elevate gains a director of engineering with deep VTOL credentials, converting the initiative from an aspirational whitepaper program into a staffed engineering organization inside Uber.
- Moore's arrival strengthens the Uber–NASA relationship pipeline, which culminates in the formal Elevate partnership and the Los Angeles 2020 aerial-taxi goal announced later that year.
Second-order effects
- A staffed aviation team forces hardware decisions sooner — Uber went on to unveil a four-rotor VTOL prototype in 2018, moving Elevate from feasibility talk (the revealed aircraft) toward a concrete vehicle program.
- Ride-hailing rivals and aerospace players watching Elevate now face a well-resourced entrant signaling that on-demand aerial mobility is a product line, not a stunt, raising pressure to stake out their own VTOL positions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Uber's model extends from routing cars to brokering new transport layers — the same playbook behind its fintech outpost and autonomy push — with regulators and agencies like NASA becoming co-designers of urban air mobility rather than gatekeepers.
- The counterweight is structural: Uber's advanced-tech bets have repeatedly shed talent when acquisitions misfire, so Elevate's long-term viability depends on whether marquee hires like Moore can be retained where the Otto-era ATG team could not be.
The trend: Platform companies are pulling government research talent in-house to turn speculative mobility concepts — flying taxis among them — into partnered, regulator-aligned product programs.