Space companies are hiring hand to mouth: filling this year’s seats with people who already know the work. In the space industry, the talent pool of experienced engineers is finite. If hiring managers in the space industry keep passing the buck on investing in younger talent, the pipeline will eventually dry up.
At the moment, senior talent dominates the space arena, and a lot of that talent will retire out of the workforce over the next decade. Our own data confirms it.
What Our Interview Data Shows
Of our placements in Q2, 49% were for senior, principal or staff roles, 23% for lead or manager roles, 19% for director, VP or C-suite roles, and just 9% for junior, associate or technician roles.
That means almost everyone else our clients hired had already done the job before, somewhere else. The rare exceptions are people companies decided, for once, to take a chance on. Actively attracting and mentoring junior talent is particularly important for startups in this industry. But only a next generation of experienced, ready-to-step-in people will fill those gaps.
Why Space Companies Want Experience Over Potential
At EVONA, we understand why space companies, particularly startups, prefer experienced talent. Space is pulling in more investment than it used to, particularly since SpaceX proved the commercial model works.
More capital means more competition to get a product to market, and investors want to see their money go toward people who can deliver immediately. That pressure helps explain what we’re seeing in our own numbers: even when a role is posted as junior, it often goes to someone who’s already done adjacent work, because a proven candidate is the safer bet when a hire has to justify itself to a board next quarter.
What “Junior” Really Means on a Space Job Description
Often, the job title on the JD says “junior” but the requirements don’t. A junior posting that asks for 2 to 3 years of space-specific experience isn’t really a junior posting. It’s a mid-level posting with a discount attached, and it locks out the exact people junior roles are meant to bring in.
This is the tension we keep running into with clients. Everyone wants a junior candidate, but nobody wants to spend the time training one.
Why Flight Heritage Makes Space Hiring Different
Space hiring is different from almost every other technical industry here, for four reasons.
What Flight Heritage Actually Requires
A self-taught software developer can build something real on their own time and use it to prove they can do the job. In space, that doesn’t exist. What space companies actually want is flight heritage: proof someone has worked on hardware that’s flown. You cannot get that without a company deciding, first, to let you near it. There’s no side project that substitutes for it.
Very Few Companies Can Give Someone Their First Shot
The number of companies that can plausibly give someone that first shot is small to begin with. In most industries, if one employer won’t train you, a dozen others in adjacent industries might. In space, the list of companies with the budget, the programs, and the appetite to take a chance on someone unproven is short. If none of them will do it, there’s nowhere else to go get that experience instead.
Long Program Timelines Mean Fewer Reps per Career
Program timelines make it worse again. A single spacecraft program can run for years. An engineer might see two or three complete programs across an entire career, from requirements through operations. Compare that to industries where people ship and iterate every week and build a decade of judgment in two years. In space, each junior hire is a slower, bigger bet, which is why companies avoid it.
Clearance Requirements Narrow the Pool Again
Clearance requirements narrow that pool of willing companies even further. A meaningful share of space roles require security clearance, which rules out training candidates from the outside even when a company might otherwise be willing.
Put those four things together, and an aging space workforce becomes a question of national capability: whether the country doing this work will have anyone qualified to do it in twenty years. That skills gap already exists. It only gets wider if the industry keeps undervaluing junior talent.
Fresh Grads Are a Real Advantage for Startups
More Hands, Fewer Dollars
Junior engineers cost less, which matters more at a startup compared to the primes. A team that can only afford two senior hires can often afford five junior ones instead, freeing up senior engineers’ time from the testing, documentation and integration work that doesn’t need their judgment.
Fresh grads also arrive with current knowledge. Engineering degrees today lean hard into the software, modeling and data tools the space industry is short on, so a new graduate often walks in with the most up-to-date industry knowledge.
An Investment in Your Future Talent Pipeline
There’s a longer payoff too. A startup that trains its own junior engineers isn’t just filling jobs reactively. It’s also building the mid-career skills it’ll need in five years, instead of fighting every other company for the same shrinking pool of experienced hires.
The Culture Fit Benefit
Someone coming from a prime is used to programs that run for years and decisions that go through several rounds of sign-off. That’s a different rhythm from a startup, where a small team needs to move fast and make calls without waiting for a formal review or sign-off from several layers of management. A junior engineer with no prior experience can often slot into a startup’s pace more easily from day one.
What Founders Can Do to Shape the Future of Space
“Space is for everyone, yet many people see it as an area that needs a special degree.”
Tom Kelly, Co-Founder at EVONA
Apprenticeships come closest to solving the flight-heritage problem, because employers build them to do exactly that: paid, employer-embedded training that doesn’t require someone to already have the experience they’re there to build.
Two US Programs Are Already Closing the Gap
Apprenti runs registered aerospace and space apprenticeships in the US built to counter this exact shortage, pairing new hires with mentors and structured, hands-on training instead of asking them to arrive already proven.
The Arizona Space Grant Consortium runs a smaller, more targeted version of the same idea. Its NASA-funded internship program places undergraduates with small to mid-sized space companies for a semester, paid, working around 10 hours a week on real project work tied to their field of study.
Startups doing things like lunar resource mining, small modular reactors and high-altitude balloon platforms make up almost the entire current lineup. That’s exactly the kind of company we’ve been talking about. It’s not a full graduate scheme, but it proves the model scales down. A startup doesn’t need a huge budget to give a junior engineer their first real project. Given how rarely we’re running junior interviews right now, building even a handful of structured paths like these into a hiring plan isn’t a nice extra. It’s close to the minimum effort required.
That conviction goes back to EVONA’s earliest days: bring in junior talent from a range of backgrounds, not just people who already have a specialized space pedigree. A strong team isn’t built by hiring every senior name that’s already worked at SpaceX. It’s built by finding people who fit the company’s values, then creating a real path for them to grow into the work.
Talk to Us About Your Junior Hiring Strategy
If your team is trying to work out where junior talent actually fits into your hiring plan, that’s a conversation EVONA has with space companies every week. Get in touch, and we’ll walk through what a realistic junior intake looks like for your team, budget, and timeline.