When a commercial space company wins its first classified contract, the excitement doesn’t last long. Pretty quickly, someone asks the question nobody has answered before: how do you build a team with security clearances when nobody on staff has one?
It’s one of the most common turning points for growth-stage space companies. Get it right and you open up a whole category of government revenue. Get it wrong and you spend 12 months burning through budget while the contract sits understaffed.
The Timeline Nobody Plans For
The first thing most companies underestimate is how long clearances actually take.
A Secret clearance: four to eight months. Top Secret: eight to fourteen months. TS/SCI with a polygraph: over 18 months.
You can’t speed this up. No amount of money, urgency, or pressure from leadership changes the timeline. The investigation takes as long as it takes. For a company that just won a contract with a six-month performance period, the math is simple: if the team doesn’t exist yet, you’re already behind.
That’s why the companies that handle this well start planning the cleared workforce before the contract is awarded. If you’re bidding on classified work, the clearance pipeline should be part of the proposal, not something you figure out after you win.
Sponsoring vs. Requiring
You need cleared people, so you hire cleared people. The problem is that the pool of engineers who already hold clearances, have the specific technical skills you need, and are willing to move to your company is tiny. For a niche discipline like propulsion, GNC, or flight software, that pool might be fewer than 50 people in the entire country.
By requiring an active clearance, you’re filtering out hundreds of engineers who are technically qualified and could get cleared – they just haven’t been through the process yet.
The alternative is to sponsor clearances. Hire engineers who are eligible (US citizens with clean backgrounds) and start the clearance process as part of onboarding. It’s slower for the individual role, but it opens up a much bigger candidate pool.
The approach that works best is a mix: hire two or three people who already have clearances to anchor the classified program, and at the same time, sponsor clearances for a larger group of strong engineers who can work on the unclassified parts while their investigations process. By the time their clearances come through, they already know the company, the tech, and the program. They just get access to the classified layer.
The Facility Comes First
Here’s something that catches a lot of companies off guard: you need an approved secure facility before cleared engineers can actually do classified work.
A SCIF or cleared workspace needs approval from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), and that process takes six to twelve months on its own. If you’re hiring cleared people but don’t have an approved space for them to work in, those clearances just sit there.
The companies that do this well run the facility accreditation in parallel with the first wave of clearance sponsorships. The engineers and the building are ready at roughly the same time. The ones that do it in sequence – facility first, then people – add six to twelve months to their timeline.
Not Everything Is Classified
This is the part that a lot of first-time defense entrants miss. A classified program doesn’t mean every task on that program is classified.
Most programs have big chunks of unclassified work: software development environments, simulation tools, design work that doesn’t involve classified inputs, testing infrastructure. All of that can be done by uncleared engineers.
The smart move is to structure the program so that as much work as possible can be done in the open, with classified access limited to the people and tasks that actually need it. This keeps the program moving while clearances are in process, and it means you need fewer clearances overall — which saves time and money.
If your program architecture requires every engineer to touch classified data, you’ve created a bottleneck. If you compartment the classified work to specific roles and interfaces, you can build a bigger team faster with a smaller cleared core.
Where the Cleared Work Happens
Classified work happens in specific places. If your company is based somewhere without defense infrastructure – no SCIFs, no cleared talent pool, no proximity to the agencies you’re serving – you’ll need to think about where the classified team actually sits.
A lot of commercial space companies solve this by opening a second office in a defense hub: Colorado Springs, the DC corridor, Huntsville, or parts of Southern California. It’s a real investment, but it solves two problems at once – facility access and local talent.
The Denver and Colorado Springs corridor is becoming the default for space companies entering classified work. The Space Force is headquartered there, there’s a deep pool of cleared talent, and the defense-adjacent company ecosystem makes it structurally easier to build a cleared team than starting from scratch somewhere that doesn’t have that infrastructure.
The Takeaway
Building a cleared engineering team isn’t the same as building a commercial team on a longer timeline. It’s a different challenge that needs parallel planning across people, facilities, and program structure.
The companies that do it well treat the clearance pipeline as infrastructure – something you build and maintain, not something you scramble to create every time a contract needs it. They sponsor clearances early, structure programs so uncleared engineers can contribute from day one, and make facility decisions early enough that the space is ready when the people are.
The ones that treat it as a hiring problem to deal with after the win – posting “active clearance required” and waiting – end up 12 months into a contract with a team that’s still half-built and a customer that’s running out of patience.