The US Defense Department is beefing up its space capabilities and companies of all sizes are getting in on it. The problem? To deliver on these contracts, they’re all after the same finite thing: people with existing security clearance.
More and More Space Companies Are Chasing Defense Dollars
Lately, a lot of money has been directed towards defense work, especially for work in the space industry:
- President Trump created the Office of Golden Dome for America in May 2025, tasked with building a new missile defense system with major space components.
- Defense-tech VC funding hit an all-time high of $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2026 alone, already past all of 2025’s full-year record of $9.6 billion.
- The Space Force’s FY2027 budget request would more than double its FY2026 funding, a 124% jump and the largest proposed increase for any military service in roughly 75 years.
Not Everyone Can Staff the Contract
Defense leaning into space is good news for startups who want to get in on the action. That’s exactly what the Department of War had in mind with the digital hub they opened on the 11th of August. The hub has been built specifically to pull more startups and commercial space companies into Golden Dome-adjacent work. It sits alongside the Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD contract vehicle, which has now approved 2,440 of 2,463 applicant companies for a pool worth up to $151 billion.
Approval Is No Longer the Bottleneck
That’s a 99% approval rate, and here’s what happens when you get approved. A SHIELD approval means you can now bid on task orders. It’s not a funded contract. Most of the companies in that 2,440 will never see funded work under it. The Missile Defense Agency has said as much directly. So winning task orders is one problem. Staffing them with cleared people is a separate one, and it’s the one that takes the most time. Here’s our advice: as a rule of thumb, if you can’t answer ‘Who will do this work, at what clearance level, and by when?’ before you sign, you’re not ready to bid.
Who You Know, Not Just What You Know
It’s important for startup founders to understand what they’re up against once they win a slice of the defense pie. Picture this: you just won your first Golden Dome-adjacent task order. Congrats. Now you have 90 days to staff five TS/SCI roles or risk losing the contract.
Investment into the defense industry may prompt more engineers to get clearance sorted in time. But for now, the skills shortage is very real, even for founders who don’t need cleared talent.
Add a need for clearance into the mix and it’s a double whammy. When it comes to cleared talent, the problem is not only “who can do the job?” but “who do you know that can do the job?”.
Why Cleared Roles Are So Hard to Fill
First, let’s clarify a common misconception. Founders often treat a lack of cleared talent the way they’d treat any other space hiring gap: too few systems engineers, too few propulsion specialists, not enough people who’ve built flight hardware before. Let’s throw more money at it. It’s an easy mistake to make in an industry where talent is so hard to come by anyway. But a skills gap is one you can only close with training, time, or a strong enough offer, while a shortage of cleared talent is a paperwork problem that’s out of your hands.
Cleared Hiring Is a Network Game
You either hold clearance at a given level or you don’t. It’s not something you can grow into or “pick up on the job”. We’ve seen how work moves on the government-facing side of this industry. Almost nobody lands a defense-adjacent role based on a cold application. They get it through a person they already worked with: a former colleague, a past program, or someone from the same small, security-cleared circle they’ve known for years. That’s why no amount of money solves your immediate problem of hiring a cleared engineer.
In the words of Sam Wiltshire, one of our own recruiters:
“If they need clearance to start with, it makes the search harder, because […] there’s only a limited number of people that are cleared.”
You Have Two Options
Startups have two options when it comes to hiring cleared talent: hire engineers who are already cleared, or wait for clearance to come through once you’ve extended an offer. Both have their problems, but your best bet is the first. There are no easy answers when it comes to retaining cleared talent for defense contracts.
How Clearance Works in the US
The Three Clearance Levels
There are three levels of clearance available in the US: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, each requiring a deeper federal background investigation than the one before it. The investigation covers finances, foreign contacts, criminal history, and drug use, going back further and digging harder the higher the level.
Accessing cleared talent is all about timing, and startups in space need the talent yesterday to avoid wasting their runway. But time is not on your side when you have to get clearance sorted from scratch.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, it took between 156 days and 227 days for most of the Secret and Top Secret Clearances to finish. If a candidate already holds an active clearance at the same level from a previous cleared role, reciprocity typically allows a new employer to bring them onto a contract in one to four weeks instead.
But Wait, Can You Sponsor Clearance?
Before advertising cleared roles, founders need to ensure their company can legally sponsor a clearance. Even if you’ve raised a strong round and won a real defense-adjacent contract, you can’t sponsor a single clearance if your business doesn’t have what’s called a Facility Security Clearance (FSC).
Here’s what founders are up against:
- FSC timeline: 3 – 6 months
- New clearance: 5 – 7+ months
- Reciprocity: 1 – 4 weeks
So the time it takes you to hire and clear the team directly determines when you can deliver. Cleared talent is not a separate HR issue; it’s the key to delivering your contract on time.
Runway Math: How Clearance Timelines Eat Your Cash
Win the contract and use it to sponsor the FSC. Only then can clearance sponsorship start for anyone you hire. The FSC process itself typically runs three to six months from sponsorship to approval, longer if the paperwork comes back incomplete on the first pass.
What changes the hiring outcome is where you stand the day the FSC clears. If the people you want are already cleared, reciprocity turns their start date into weeks. If you’re starting the candidate search from zero on the same day, you’re stacking two multi-month timelines back to back. That also means you’re looking at eight to thirteen months, the better part of a year, before anyone’s doing billable work on the contract.
Getting ahead of that means building relationships with cleared candidates before the FSC exists to sponsor them. Your job as a founder is to get into that circle before you need it. A recruiter who already knows the cleared talent pool can be doing the groundwork of networking with already cleared engineers, while your paperwork is still moving through DCSA. Winning the contract isn’t the finish line. Delivering on it depends on the cleared-staffing plan you built before you signed.