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NASA engineer spent $200 to start a side hustle from her closet—now it brings in over $32,000 a month
At her full-time job, Eryn Andrews splits her time between a cubicle, a lab and a "lunar sandbox" testing facility at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. As a NASA human performance engineer, she collects and analyzes data to help astronauts move seamlessly in their spacesuits.
Her 5-to-9 routine is starkly different: Andrews runs a side hustle recording voiceovers in a makeshift sound booth, lined with mattress toppers to block out noise, in her guest bedroom closet. The 41-year-old brings in six figures per year as a voiceover actor, with over $227,000 in 2026 earnings already, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
She spends one to eight hours per week recording voiceovers — primarily internal corporate announcements, company voicemail boxes and workplace training videos for clients like Coca-Cola, PetSmart and the University of Mississippi, she says. Her side hustle earnings started outpacing her six-figure NASA salary during the summer of 2025, she adds.
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Andrews has worked at NASA since 2008, and didn't set out to become a multihyphenate. In March 2022, she was a newly-divorced single mom in Houston. She wanted an extra $200 a month to treat her then-6-year-old daughter to ice cream or the children's museum without guilt. She Googled "single mom side hustles," and found voiceover acting in the search results, she says.
She has never relied on her voiceover work to pay bills, she says, but it helps her feel a greater sense of financial freedom amid high costs of living nationwide . Many Americans feel their salaries don't provide the same kind of financial stability, as economic factors like inflation and tariffs make food and energy more expensive. Of the Americans making between $100,000 and $249,000 annually, 41% report living paycheck-to-paycheck , according to CNBC and SurveyMonkey's quarterly money survey published on July 20.
Andrews has used her extra income — now roughly $32,400 per month, on average — to travel, buy a used 2025 Toyota Rav4 and start a savings account for her child's future college tuition, she says. "To have a second income stream that, at this point, has far surpassed my main salary in a completely different industry, really give[s] me some breathing room," she says, adding: "I'm probably the most relaxed I've ever been in my adult life ... I don't have to count every penny."
Andrews, who has a master's degree in space studies from the University of North Dakota, started her side hustle by spending roughly $200 on a voiceover class, a microphone and a 1-inch mattress topper from Walmart. She built a mini-recording room for herself from cardboard, and Velcroed the mattress topper to the side of it for soundproofing. The room-within-a-room was too small for her to stand up while recording, she says.
She created a profile on online freelancer marketplace Fiverr, hoping to attract virtually any kind of paying client, she says. With no track record, she initially, and set lower prices than other voiceover actors on the platform, and brought in $1,000 in her first month off a handful of gigs, she says. Now, instead of charging $5 per 100 words, "[I don't] turn on my computer for less than $200," she says.
Andrews cites her voice's "gravelly texture" as part of her popularity. "The last couple of years of AI [advancement gave way to] very overly polished voices," she says. "I think a lot of people are craving the authenticity of a real voice, which is going to have some natural variation, some texture to it."
The majority of her clients, including Apple, still book Andrews through Fiverr. She's landed other bookings through her website and through referrals, she says.
For now, most of Andrews' projects are short by intention: She'd make more money recording longer projects like audiobooks, but the time-consuming work could cut into her time with her daughter, she says. For every minute of audio a client requests, "it takes me three minutes to record it, then edit it and be just a little neurotic about it before sending it off," she says.
The voiceover work can be "feast or famine," says Andrews. "I'll go sometimes weeks hearing nothing, then suddenly, out of the woodwork, here comes a half dozen different clients within 24 hours."
The side hustle's ebb-and-flow contrasts with the steady paycheck and cadence of her NASA job. There, her work primarily involves analyzing human performance data. Her team is working to better understand the physical and cognitive effects of working and living on the moon, she says.
Her NASA role is challenging and rewarding, and she doesn't intend to leave, though she'd consider it if she landed a high-paying creative role, like a Disney character, she says. She recently started taking character-based voiceover jobs in video games and animated comics, and while they typically pay less than corporate gigs, she's passionate about more narrative projects, she says.
She now works with coaches who specialize in character voice acting, and hopes to get an agent to increase her odds of landing more auditions, she says. She networks at industry gatherings like The VO Atlanta Voiceover Conference, practicing reading in front of experienced voiceover actors and receiving constructive feedback.
"I didn't come from this world, so part of me has impostor syndrome. 'Who the hell are you, thinking you can just step up to this place?' I'm just a dorky engineer," she says.
In August 2025, Andrews won an award at the One Voice Conference in Dallas for her performance as a worried mother in The Obsessive Shadow video game.
"My whole life has been about NASA, and I've always been very math-science minded. I've never considered myself artistic," says Andrews. "[Voiceover gives me] the confidence that I can step foot in either world, and I'm going to be all right."
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