A NASA engineer's $200 closet voiceover side hustle now earns $32,400 a month

Eryn Andrews, 41, has worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center since 2008, collecting and analyzing human-performance data to help astronauts move seamlessly in their spacesuits. In March 2022 she was a newly divorced single mother in Houston who wanted an extra $200 a month to treat her six-year-old daughter to ice cream or the children's museum without guilt — and a Google search for "single mom side hustles" surfaced voiceover acting.

Turn a naturally textured voice into a service with a $200 closet studio: start cheap on Fiverr, take corporate clients, and let AI's polish raise the value of voices.

Andrews spent about $200 on a voiceover class, a microphone and a one-inch mattress topper from Walmart, then built a recording booth from cardboard and Velcro inside her guest-bedroom closet. She opened a Fiverr profile at prices below established voice actors, earned $1,000 in her first month from a handful of gigs, and recorded mostly short corporate work — voicemail boxes, internal announcements and training videos — in one-to-eight-hour weekly sessions. As demand grew she raised her floor: now she does not turn on her computer for less than $200.

Andrews' voiceover earnings began outpacing her six-figure NASA salary in the summer of 2025. By August 2026, CNBC Make It reviewed documents showing more than $227,000 in 2026 voiceover earnings — roughly $32,400 a month — from clients including Coca-Cola, PetSmart, the University of Mississippi and Apple, with most bookings still made through Fiverr. She has used the income for travel, a used 2025 Toyota RAV4 and a savings account for her daughter's college tuition.

Eryn Andrews is a human performance engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center, a job she has held since 2008, splitting her time between a cubicle, a lab and a lunar-sandbox test facility. In March 2022, newly divorced and raising a six-year-old daughter in Houston, she wanted an extra $200 a month to treat her child without guilt. Searching for "single mom side hustles," she discovered voiceover acting.

She launched on roughly $200: a voiceover class, a microphone and a one-inch Walmart mattress topper, with a booth of cardboard and Velcro built in her guest-bedroom closet — too small to stand up in. Opening a Fiverr profile at prices below established actors, she earned $1,000 in her first month from a handful of gigs recording corporate voicemail, internal announcements and training videos for clients such as Coca-Cola, PetSmart and the University of Mississippi.

Her earnings passed her six-figure NASA salary in summer 2025, and CNBC-reviewed documents showed over $227,000 in 2026 voiceover income — about $32,400 a month — by August. She still records one to eight hours a week, declines work under $200, keeps her day job, and has begun character voice work in video games and animated comics, winning an award at the One Voice Conference in Dallas in August 2025.

The budget made failure affordable: a class, a microphone and a mattress topper cost about $200, so she could test the market without betting her savings.

Fiverr gave an unknown voice access to buyers with no network; deliberately low prices bought the first month's reviews and $1,000.

Her voice's natural gravel offered what synthetic voices cannot, and she leaned into it as AI made automated reads sound overly polished.

She kept the work genuinely part-time — one to eight hours a week, short projects, a $200 floor — so the side hustle added income instead of replacing parenting time.

A side business does not need a new skill: a gravelly human voice became a premium asset just as AI voices turned polished, so authenticity and texture can be the product itself.

By August 2026 Andrews was earning about $32,400 a month from voiceover while remaining a NASA engineer, describing herself as "probably the most relaxed I've ever been." She spent the income on travel, a used 2025 Toyota RAV4 and her daughter's college savings. She has begun taking character roles in video games and animated comics, works with character-voice coaches, networks at events such as The VO Atlanta Voiceover Conference, and hopes to find an agent — while saying she would only leave NASA for a high-paying creative role like a Disney character.