Great thought. Where in California? If in San Francisco (or the Bay Area in general) I can think of a number of places and people who would be happy to talk in person.
We are in LA but because it is a private home school situation we are lucky enough that traveling to SF is a real possibility. We were already planning to visit an autonomous car start up in SF sometime this month. If you want to pm me on reddit please do (https://www.reddit.com/user/yewew/). Thank you so much for your interest.
Are you on any of the gifted homeschooler lists? When my sons were children being homeschooled in California, I knew folks active in the LA area. It seems to me that would be a better path for figuring this out than posting on HN.
Though this is a website that was held in high esteem back in the day and happens to be owned by a member of HN: http://learninfreedom.org/
I'm in LA and work at SpaceX as an engineer. You mentioned you had two aerospace companies already, not sure if SpaceX is one of them.
I would be happy to talk to you/your students. I only am where I am because of other people that helped me out where I was a kid, especially my mom who like you would, and actually still does, to find really cool opportunities like this to help me learn more about the world.
What part of LA are you located in? Maybe we can set something up
That would be awesome! We are planning to visit the telescope under construction at Grumman, but spaceX is one of my favorite companies to follow so I would personally get a kick out of working together as well. My students love space so it is right up their alley. Are you on reddit so we can pm? /u/yewew