Daily Inspiration: Meet Camilo Tobacia

Today we’d like to introduce you to Camilo Tobacia.

Hi Camilo, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My name is Camilo Tobacia and I am the founder of Space United Football Club. I am a former youth professional soccer player, former engineer at SpaceX, and current spacecraft engineer at Blue Origin. In 2014 I was inpired to create an organization that would harness the inpirational forces of soccer and space exploration to promote a meaningful change in society.

Space United was founded in 2014 along with our mission to harness the forces of Space & Soccer to inspire our communities to embrace education and sports and live with passion, purpose and integrity. Our club is made up of a diverse community of footballers that includes influential members from our nation’s most innovative space exploration companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, and more…) as well soccer athletes and space enthusiasts.

Space and soccer are not typical topics to be considered in the same sentence, but for me education and sports played a big role in our success story. The story that begins with our dad, who grew up in poverty and adversity in Colombia, yet changed his life and the life of his family through his determination in school. Fortunately for us, our dad had a passion for engineering and a talent for teaching. He engaged us with STEM questions, making the concepts understandable and even fun, and he was the one who put the possibility of becoming an engineer in our heads. When we were not at school, we were playing and breathing soccer. Soccer was our first passion and is inseparable from our identities. We live for the beauty and grit of it, its technicalities, its rhythm, the culture, the glory, the sweat and the raw emotions. With soccer and education, our minds and bodies were active and felt alive with positive purpose.

As a result, Space United came about as the realization of my deepest passions, Space & Soccer. Both of these areas have had an incredible positive impact in my life, so I wanted to capture the inspirational forces behind them to create a universal organization that would work to inspire our communities to embrace education and sports. The initial idea behind the team came while working at SpaceX, when I realized there were many engineers who, like me, had a deep passion and appreciation for soccer, and they too had unique stories of how education and sports played a positive role in their lives. This was the moment I realized we had a deeper mission than just a Sunday league team and instead Space United had the potential to serve as a platform to inspire our communities to embrace education and sports.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The whole process has been a learning and fun experience for our team. We get to engineer an idea and bring it to life while also learning about topics and areas where we did not have as much experience. This project has really opened up the possibilities for us to explore and grow our skills in other areas like marketing, web development, social media management, brand design, and other areas that we typically do not see a lot in engineering. The 2020 pandemic has challenged our ability to be on the pitch, but we decided to take this time to grow our community driven educaitonal program as well as set in place the plan to get Space United FC competing at a professional level.

Ultimately all endeavors come with challenges and difficulties, but perseverance is what eventually creates success stories. We believe our team brings incredible ideas and value from their professional experiences in sports and space exploration and is from that passion and desire that we draw to continue driving our plan forward. Our next challenge ahead is to find a partners that can help us take our team to the next level in professional competition. Networking and finding investors is not an easy task, specially during a pandemic year, but we are excited and confident about what the future holds for our team.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I split my time between engineering and sports.

As a manufacturing engineer, I have successfully led and accomplished many innovative projects, including the building of space crew capsules -the same spacecrafts that are are pionnering the next space exploration revolution that will soon bring us back to the moon, and one day will send the first humans to Mars and beyond.

For Space United we currently manage 2 amateur soccer teams in Los Angeles and Seattle and we are working to establish a professional soccer club and a youth academy. In addition to our soccer clubs, our organization established in 2019 a community driven program in education called Inspiring Space & Sports (ISS). With our ISS Program we are collaborating with educators and schools to provide STEM resources and integartive educational modules. We are sharing the inspirational forces of soccer and academics and giving children across the globe access to top of the line resources to help them shape their futures.

So at Space United, we are not only a championship lower division soccer club with great athletes and space engineers from diverse cultural backgrounds, but we are also an organization that works hard to inspire underserved communities to embrace both education and sports and the values of passion, purpose and integrity that get us there.

So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
We are very active across all social media platforms under @SpaceUnitedFC. Also, we can be reached our website at www.spaceutd.com or via email at [email protected]. We are growing our reach with fun STEM activities and entertaining Space & Sports podcasts, and we are always looking for collaborators to help bring this ideas to realization.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: www.spaceutd.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spaceunitedfc
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spaceunitedfc
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/spaceunitedfc
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/spaceunited
• Other: https://www.twitch.tv/spaceunitedfc

Image Credits
Brian Gallardo Camilo Tobacia Sebastian Tobacia Jay Odom