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Author: Jones

Can Space Manufacturing Talent Keep Up With NASA’s $600M Lander Deal?  

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On June 30, 2026, NASA awarded a $600 million deal to three companies to build the next generation of robotic Moon landers. It’s one piece of their plan for a permanent Moon Base, continuously crewed by 2032. While doing something ground-breaking, this deal is betting on the availability of critically low space manufacturing talent. Companies involved will need to answer this question: “is there enough space manufacturing talent to actually build this?”

Who Got What: the Breakdown

Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines have been tasked with delivering four landers between them, due on the lunar surface by late 2028:

  • Astrobotic takes $297.9 million, for two lunar deliveries
  • Firefly gets $144.2 million, for one delivery
  • Intuitive Machines gets $148.3 million, also for one delivery

Altogether, the deal is worth close to $600 million, awarded through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, as part of its wider Moon Base effort.

Things get really interesting when looking closely at that split. More than half of Intuitive Machines’ award ($79.7 million of the $148.3 million) has nothing to do with landing successfully on the Moon. It’s a performance incentive tied to proving the company can build the same lander again, on a production line.

What This Means for Space Manufacturing Talent

Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said that NASA is “shifting the paradigm from custom aerospace engineering to commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure.”

Building one hand-built lander takes a small group of elite design engineers who can solve a problem once. Building the same lander over and over takes a different organization, and a different set of people to run it.

Three Companies Now Need:

  • Production and manufacturing engineers, to design the assembly line rather than just the lander
  • Assembly technicians, who can replicate the same standard every time
  • Supply chain specialists, who can source parts at volume
  • Quality and reliability engineers, because doing it once is no longer the objective

These aren’t new roles in aerospace. What’s new is the scale of hiring required. Nobody’s built at this volume before, so the people who know how are clustered in just two places: SpaceX’s Starlink line, and Airbus’s OneWeb facility. Three companies are now chasing that same small group of engineers, and there aren’t enough of them to go around. That’s why the more realistic hires might come from automotive and consumer electronics, instead of aerospace companies.

NASA’s Commercial Space Strategy Catches Up to Satellites

The industry has gone from reusing a rocket booster, to reusing 85 percent of a rover’s hardware, to now paying a company just to prove it can build the same lander twice. The shift we’re seeing in the production of landers, is something we’ve seen before with satellites. Airbus and OneWeb proved that satellites can be mass-produced way back in 2019, and Starlink pushed the idea further still. 

Their Florida facility ran two production lines, turning out two satellites a day. A custom satellite used to take over a year to build, and cost tens of millions. 

A satellite that fails just gets swapped out on the next launch, one machine among thousands. A lander doesn’t get that luxury. NASA’s deal covers four landers, not four thousand, and each one has to work the first time.

What NASA’s Money Can’t Buy: Space Manufacturing Talent

Money buys parts, tooling, and facilities. It doesn’t buy an assembly technician who already knows how flight hardware differs from anything else they’ve built, or a supply chain lead who understands what happens when one connector supplier misses a date. Those people exist in small numbers, and they aren’t waiting to be found.

NASA can fund the shift to mass production, but it can’t fully control how it plays out. The outcome depends on three companies succeeding at something none of them has done before, all while competing for the same scarce production talent, on the same deadline.

NASA has made the funding available to build landers on repeat. Whether Astrobotic, Firefly, or Intuitive Machines pull it off will come down to who finds the right people first.

Stop Counteroffering and Start Retaining Aerospace Engineers 

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A counteroffer can’t undo the eighteen months that led to a resignation, but it can make an inevitable departure more expensive. Retaining aerospace engineers starts long before an engineer even considers resigning. A recent AIA–McKinsey workforce study found that aerospace and defense companies continue to face “industry‑wide attrition… at nearly 15 percent,”, more than double the U.S. industry average.

It’s the same instinct almost every time. One of your best engineers hands in their notice, and you do what any manager in your shoes would: find out what it would take, then match it.

You offer more money, maybe a new title, and they say yes. Six months later, sometimes less, they’re gone anyway. 

Should You Counteroffer an Employee Who Resigned? 

By the time you’re making a counteroffer, an engineer has often already done the hard part. They’ve decided to leave. They may already have an offer in hand. 

Asking them to undo all of that for a higher number is asking a lot. The engineers who accept counteroffers are often the ones who are still weighing their options. The result of a counteroffer is that you’re now paying above market for someone who has already mentally checked out.

To retain an aerospace engineer, the better question to ask is not “What can I offer to make them stay?” but “What happened that made them want to leave?”

Spot Signs of Disengagement Before They Hand in Their Notice 

As a manager, it’s important to look out for signs of disengagement. An engineer who used to push for more responsibility might stop volunteering for new work. Someone who is usually engaged becomes quieter in meetings. Conversations about the future become less frequent, or disappear completely.

Money matters, but it’s rarely the answer to a resignation. What space engineers care about is often less about salary reviews and more about whether they still see a future at the company, trust their manager, and feel connected to the work they were hired to do.

Reasons Engineers Quit: We Hear These All the Time 

It’s worth understanding why space companies lose engineers, because the resignation is often the result of problems that have been compounding for months.

Career and Growth Stagnation 

Sometimes the next step simply doesn’t exist yet. At a smaller space company, an ambitious engineer can find themselves doing senior-level work with no obvious path forward, while peers elsewhere are taking on bigger technical challenges or moving into leadership roles.

Mission or Program Mismatch 

Many engineers join because they believe in a mission. When that mission changes or gets delayed, the job they’re in can start to feel very different from the one they accepted.

Management and Leadership Friction 

Engineers rarely leave because of one bad day. More often, trust erodes slowly through missed promises, changing priorities, or a manager who makes it harder to do good work. By the time someone resigns, that frustration has usually been ongoing for a while.

Pace and Visibility of Progress 

Space programs can take years to reach major milestones. When progress feels slow and contributions go unnoticed, even highly engaged engineers can start looking elsewhere, for a place where they can have a more visible impact.

Autonomy and Trust 

Most experienced engineers want ownership. When every decision is second-guessed or too much time is spent navigating the process instead of solving problems, frustration tends to build quickly.

Compensation Structure 

Money matters, but it is not always the real issue. Often the problem is that an engineer’s responsibilities have grown while their compensation, equity, or recognition has stayed exactly the same.

External Pull Factors 

Space engineers know they have options. The moment they start taking recruiter calls, they are exposed to opportunities, locations, missions, and career paths they had not previously considered.

Burnout and Personal Capacity 

Launch campaigns, test windows, and critical milestones can demand a lot from people. Most engineers can handle periods of intensity. When the intensity becomes the norm rather than the exception, other offers might start to look more attractive.

Why Retention Got Harder in the Last Two Years 

Engineers have always had moments of doubt about growth, mission, or management. A few years ago, a frustrated engineer may have stayed anyway. There were only so many companies building serious hardware, and moving was a real gamble. 

But things have started changing. Capital is flooding into the sector, with new companies launching constantly, and almost all of them are hiring for the same skill sets. 

At the same time, space is becoming mainstream. The work is more visible, the salaries are more competitive, and employers are shaping their brands to appeal to the engineers they need. The engineer who used to feel stuck has far more options now than before. 

Instead of a Counteroffer, Do This 

A counteroffer is trying, too late, to compensate for the reasons an engineer has been unsatisfied in a role. The solution lies less in having a retention plan and more in paying attention from day one. Here are some things to consider as a manager in the space industry:

  • Make sure you are having the growth conversation before someone assumes their role is going nowhere
  • Be honest about changes to the mission and project timelines
  • Make sure an engineer’s compensation and recognition keep pace with what’s expected of them, and not what they were hired to do two years ago.

None of these things will save every departure. For some people, it’s time to leave, and no amount of attention will change that. But paying attention can change how an engineer feels about their role while they’re still in it.

A counteroffer can only respond to a resignation. The companies that retain their best engineers are not the ones writing the biggest checks at the end. They are the ones paying attention from the start.

Your First Sales Hire at Series A Isn’t What You’d Expect

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At the Seed stage, your pitch deck was your product, and your passion was your sales strategy. You wore every hat because you had to. But you’ve just closed your Series A, and the game has fundamentally changed. You’re no longer just building a cool engineering project; you’re building a commercial engine. And that means making your first sales hire.

If you remain the primary salesperson for your company, you will become the single biggest bottleneck to your own growth. The question isn’t whether you need help. It’s how to hire someone who can carry the torch without burning the house down.

That’s why the first role we see founders hire for is an experienced business development lead. It’s a good move. But, as with most hires, the devil is in the details.

What Your First Sales Hire at Series A Should Look Like:

Building a sales function is how you create a steady pipeline and a predictable revenue stream. The key is setting your first hire up to succeed. It’s easy to be impressed by years of experience and big industry names. But you can end up hiring someone who isn’t up for the challenges a startup like yours will face. In our experience, two things are more important than the resume:

Scrappiness Over Seniority & Government Expertise

Most space companies want the safety of government contracts. So founders often aim high, hiring a BD director or VP from a large company who knows federal compliance inside out. On paper, this makes sense, but the risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to space startups.

If you hire for regulatory know-how alone, you could end up with someone who understands the process but can’t build you a pipeline. Navigating government bureaucracy isn’t the same skill as hunting for new business. And someone used to a team, bid writers, and a recognizable brand will struggle without that infrastructure.

You need someone with tenacity, some government exposure, and enough technical understanding to be taken seriously. A lot of early deals closed because you could talk to prospects engineer to engineer, and your first sales hire needs to do the same while building the sales function from scratch. Pair that with strong commercial instinct and enough government understanding to navigate the process, and you’ve got yourself a winning sales hire.

As Index Ventures put it in their startup handbook Scaling Through Chaos, “grit and a growth mindset are more important than fancy but established brand names.”

Grit and a growth mindset are more important than fancy but established brand names.

Startup Instinct Over a SaaS or Prime Resume

Founders tend to hire from one of two pools: aerospace primes, or fast-growth consumer tech. Both of these come with their own problems. Someone from a consumer-tech company is used to things moving quickly. Space doesn’t work like that. Everything takes longer. Parts show up late, and you can’t rush things. Someone from a prime has the opposite problem: all red tape, and no startup instinct. What you want is someone in between, who knows the tech but can still build from scratch. When you’re sizing up a track record, don’t take their word for it. Ask your talent partner to verify it by checking publicly available company records. Contract wins in space are announced publicly, so it’s easy to confirm who’s actually closed deals.

Your First Sales Hire in Practice: A SpaceX Example

In our experience, the best sales people in a startup often come from a technical background. In 2002, Gwynne Shotwell was the 11th person hired into the company, joining as VP of Business Development. She trained as an engineer, but she could also sell. She went on to become President and COO. Her combination of technical credibility and commercial instinct is what you should be aiming for. But the commercial hire you need is often more junior than you’d expect because the right person will grow with you and mold to your evolving culture.

How to Hire and Retain Your First Sales Role

The mission is not enough. Don’t forget to sell the opportunity. Remember that this talent is in high demand, so you are in the hot seat too. The mission helps, but it takes more than that to win someone over. It’s worth treating the hiring process as a sales process in its own right.

Define the Function Before the Title

Before you start selling the opportunity, it’s important to be clear about what the role needs to do. Generating pipeline, closing enterprise contracts, building go-to-market from scratch, managing government relationships… each of these will require a different kind of person. A job description that’s not clear can cost you months of runway and wasted money.

Move Quickly

In this market, speed is everything. Founder-led searches for senior roles tend to drag on for months and eat up time you don’t have, and the best people won’t wait around. That’s why working with a specialist with access to the talent you need is crucial to securing the best sales hires in space.

Offer a Competitive Package

Think about what you can offer. You can’t promise a large commission plan yet, so lean on what a startup does have. Most of the startups we work with lead with equity and stock options, flexibility, and the chance to build and own a sales function from the ground up. For the right person, the opportunity to shape the department is the real draw.

Give Your Sales Person Enough Time

Finally, don’t expect traction overnight. The person you hire is building your sales function from scratch, with no playbook. That takes time, and space makes it slower still, because government sales cycles are long and relationships are built over months, not weeks. Hire someone used to scaling what already exists, and you’ll both get frustrated quickly.

The Takeaway

Your first commercial hire isn’t about finding the most impressive name on paper. It’s about hiring for the company you are today, and the person who can build what you need next. One of the greatest advantages of partnering with a specialized talent firm is that they look at the macro-dynamics of the entire market, not just the passive stack of resumes sitting in your applicant tracking system.

They can immediately help you differentiate between a genuine talent shortage and an over-scoped JD that is simply asking for the impossible. Get crystal clear on the outcomes you need to achieve first. Once you do, the ideal hire becomes impossible to miss.

Orbital Data Centers Are Creating a New Category of Space Jobs – Here’s Who’s Hiring in 2026

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A five-month-old company with six employees just filed with the FCC to launch 100,000 satellites.

Not communication satellites, not Earth observation satellites, but data centers in orbit. The space hiring it triggers touches a talent pool the sector has never tapped before.

Orbital, based in Los Angeles, wants to put 10 gigawatts of computing power in space – roughly the same amount of new electricity capacity the entire US power grid added last year. The satellites would be 100-kilowatt class, sitting in low Earth orbit between 500 and 850 kilometers, with solar arrays and radiators spanning about 100 meters each.

The plan is early, and Orbital has $5 million in pre-seed funding, a team of six people from SpaceX, Amazon, and Northrop Grumman, and a demo mission planned for next year with a single GPU. The first real compute satellite isn’t expected until 2028. The full constellation is into the next decade.

But Orbital isn’t the only story. It’s the latest signal in a pattern that’s been building all year – and that pattern is about to change who space companies are hiring in 2026 and beyond.

Who’s Building Orbital Data Centers in 2026

Orbital’s filing landed three weeks after the company came out of stealth. It joins a growing list of companies betting that the future of AI computing isn’t in a warehouse in Virginia – it’s in orbit.

SpaceX filed with the FCC in January for up to one million orbital data center satellites. That filing came days after the SpaceX-xAI merger and fits into a broader strategy that includes the $1.75 trillion IPO. SpaceX’s S-1 showed its AI segment burning $7.7 billion in capital expenditure in Q1 alone, and the company has said it plans to deploy data centers in space as early as 2028.

Starcloud has proposed an 88,000-satellite constellation with 200-kilowatt-class spacecraft. Cowboy Space has filed its own orbital compute plans. Even Vast – the station company that recently expanded into satellite buses – is offering an optional NVIDIA AI compute module on its platform.

The thesis behind all of them is the same: AI is eating more power than the ground can provide. Data centers need electricity, cooling, and land, and all three are running short. Space has constant sunlight for power, the vacuum of space for cooling, and no neighbors to complain about noise or water usage.

Whether 100,000 or a million orbital data centers actually get built is a question for the next decade. But the investment is moving now, and the AI jobs in space it creates are already being filled.

The New Engineering Roles Orbital Data Centers Are Creating

Here’s why this matters for anyone thinking about where space careers are heading.

Every other trend we’ve covered this year – Artemis, Golden Dome, the Space Force budget, commercial constellations – creates demand for traditional space engineers. Systems engineers, GNC specialists, propulsion engineers, flight software developers – the people who’ve always built spacecraft.

Orbital data centers are different. They need those people too – someone has to build the satellite bus, design the power systems, manage the thermal environment in orbit. But they also need an entirely new category of talent that the space sector has never recruited before.

Data center architects who understand how to design computing infrastructure at scale.

The people who’ve spent their careers at AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Meta designing the cooling systems, power distribution, and rack layouts for terrestrial server farms. Their knowledge of thermal management, power efficiency, and high-density computing translates directly to the orbital problem – the physics are different, but the engineering principles are the same.

GPU and chip-level engineers who understand how processors perform under extreme conditions.

Space adds radiation, vacuum, and thermal cycling to the engineering challenge. Nvidia’s involvement (through partnerships with Vast and others) signals that the GPU expertise currently concentrated in Silicon Valley is about to become relevant to space for the first time.

Optical networking specialists who can build the communication links between satellites and between orbit and the ground.

Orbital’s plan – like SpaceX’s and Starcloud’s – relies on optical inter-satellite links to move data between the compute nodes and back to Earth. The engineers who build these links are currently working in telecom and fiber optics. Space needs them.

Power systems engineers at a scale the space sector hasn’t seen.

A 100-kilowatt satellite is roughly ten times the power of a typical commercial communications satellite. Designing, deploying, and managing solar arrays and power distribution at that level is a different engineering problem than what most spacecraft power engineers have worked on.

This is a discipline convergence. Two talent pools – space hardware and terrestrial computing infrastructure -that have never overlapped are about to merge. The engineers at hyperscalers who’ve never considered a space career are suddenly relevant. And the space engineers who’ve never thought about data center architecture are about to need that vocabulary. For software engineers wondering how to get into the space industry, this may be the most accessible entry point yet.

Orbital Data Center Timeline: What’s Funded and What’s Still Speculative

Let’s be clear about timelines. Orbital has six people and $5 million. Their first GPU demo is next year, and full-scale deployment is years away. Even SpaceX’s million-satellite filing is aspirational at this point – the technology for orbital computing at that scale doesn’t fully exist yet.

But the hiring doesn’t wait for the technology to be ready. SpaceX is already building toward orbital compute through its xAI integration. Vast is offering AI modules on its satellite bus. The defense sector is investing billions in space-based data processing through programs like Golden Dome and the Space Force’s AI command-and-control experiments.

The companies that will lead orbital computing in 2030 are hiring the founding teams now. And those teams are being built from a talent pool that didn’t exist as a category twelve months ago.

What This Means for Space Careers

The space sector has always hired rocket scientists, satellite engineers, and mission operators. That’s not changing. But the orbital data center race is adding a new layer of demand – for engineers who understand computing infrastructure, thermal management at scale, GPU performance, and optical networking.

For the first time, a career at Google’s data center division or Meta’s infrastructure team is directly relevant experience for a space company. That’s a shift the sector hasn’t seen before, and it’s going to reshape who space companies recruit, where they recruit from, and what a “space career” looks like for the next generation of engineers.

The newest job in space isn’t building rockets. It’s building the servers that fly on them.

The Impossible Space Hire: Is This What’s Holding You Back?

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Is it really a talent shortage?

Looking for specialized engineering talent? The impossible space hire might be what’s holding founders back from the right hire.

We’ve talked about the talent shortage in the space sector before. While some roles are legitimately hard to recruit for, the combination of skills clients are asking for in one person is often the real bottleneck. If every candidate seems to be missing one critical skill, the obvious assumption is that the talent pool is the problem. But before blaming the market, it’s worth asking: Is the role realistic? Once the round closes, that’s often the last question founders are asking.

Why the stakes are higher after a funding round

Once money arrives, founders are under pressure to hire and start scaling. And it’s pressure to deliver that often prevents founders from securing the right hire. 

The team needs to move faster. There are investors to answer to, milestones to hit and a burn rate to manage. A founder may start out looking for a systems engineer. Then they add program management experience because the team is growing. Customer-facing experience because key stakeholders need updates. The role slowly changes from one job into three. 

Part of this comes down to money. Adding another person to the team can mean adding hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses. And because it’s investor money, every hire is scrutinized. Trying to solve multiple problems with one hire pushes founders toward asking for more skills in one person. 

Instead of asking what the role needs to deliver in the next six to twelve months, companies start trying to cover every possible gap in one hire. This is how the impossible space hire takes shape. Enter the job description.

Why the impossible space hire doesn’t exist

In our experience, no two companies want exactly the same engineer. That’s completely normal. A VP of Engineering at an early-stage venture might need to be hands-on, building and testing for years before production starts. The same role at a Series C company might mean managing a hundred-person team instead. The problem comes in when the job description becomes a wishlist of every skill the team might need.

Job descriptions tend to fail in one of two ways: they are either too vague or over-scoped. In space engineering, founders often try to future-proof against expensive hardware mistakes by including multiple deep engineering disciplines into a single job description. The result is often a candidate that does not exist in the market. 

Take a role that asks for heavy electrical-test, software, and RF experience in one hire. In our experience, candidates tend to have two of these skills, but never all three. Instead of searching for a ghost, the better move is hiring one engineer strong on RF, and another strong on software test. Between them, you get total coverage.

This is important because electrical test, RF, and software are specialties in their own right. Asking for all three in one person makes the role impossible to fill.

What does good look like for your startup?

SpaceX is famous for its hiring standards. They can afford to be selective because they know exactly what they’re hiring for. Candidates are measured against the demands of a specific role and a specific mission.

For startups, the lesson is not to copy SpaceX’s hiring process. It is to be clear about what success looks like in the role. Naturally, most startups don’t have the name recognition of SpaceX. The hiring process needs to be thorough, but it also needs to be fast. 

A founder who has just raised a Series A round is often looking for certainty. They want someone who has seen the next stage of growth before and can help them avoid expensive mistakes. 

The question is not whether someone has worked with a particular technology or holds a specific degree. The question is whether they have solved the challenge your company is about to face. Once you’re clear on the challenge, it becomes much easier to separate the skills you need from the ones that are “nice to have”.

Before blaming the market, read the job description again

Founders coming up short on talent may be forgiven for blaming the market. It’s worth looking at the resumes already sitting in your inbox first. Those resumes show what’s actually available.

One advantage of working with a specialist talent partner is that they can see the whole market, not just the candidates who have applied. That makes it easier to spot the difference between a talent shortage and a job description problem.

What the resumes are telling you

If the same gap shows up over and over, have a look at the job description again. There is a chance the combination of skills you’re looking for doesn’t exist. An impossible space hire and a shortage of the right candidates aren’t the same thing.

It’s a bit like buying your first house. After viewing enough properties, you start to learn which features are essential and which ones you are willing to compromise on. Hiring works the same way.

Start with the outcome

Once you’ve separated the priorities from the nice-to-haves, there are two options to consider. You can either split the job description into two roles, or decide which skill is essential for the role. 

The goal is to be clear about which requirements are tied to success in the role and which have been added as insurance:

  • What do your investors expect you to achieve in 6 months or 12 months? 
  • What are the non-negotiables for the next stage of growth?
  • What can you not sacrifice?

The takeaway

The strongest hiring processes start with clarity, not certainty. Be clear about the outcome you need to achieve, then use the market to test your assumptions and refine the role as you go. 

When founders define the outcomes first, the job description becomes clearer and the interview process becomes easier. This opens up a larger talent pool.

Industry authorities like SpaceNews have highlighted the same thing. Realistic requirements and early stakeholder alignment lead to better hires.

Realistic requirements and early stakeholder alignment lead to better hires.

For more hiring advice for the space industry, read our insights on how the hiring process changes after series A funding, why candidates reject your offers, and talent shortages in the sector. The best founders don’t have all the answers at the start. They know what success looks like, then use the market to challenge and refine their assumptions.

AST SpaceMobile Just Proved That Setbacks Don’t Define a Space Company

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Yesterday at 2:39 AM, three AST SpaceMobile satellites launched successfully from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. BlueBirds 8, 9, and 10 – the largest commercial communications arrays ever deployed in low Earth orbit, each measuring approximately 2,400 square feet – are now in orbit and operational.

It was the first time AST SpaceMobile launched three satellites on a single rocket. The Falcon 9’s booster, flying for the 29th time, landed cleanly on its drone ship. The mission went exactly as planned.

Three weeks ago, that outcome wasn’t obvious.

What Happened Between Then and Now

In late May, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket – one of AST SpaceMobile’s contracted launch providers – exploded during a static fire test at Cape Canaveral. The rocket, the launch pad, and the ground infrastructure were destroyed, and it was Blue Origin’s only New Glenn pad.

That explosion came after an earlier setback in April, when New Glenn’s third flight placed AST’s BlueBird 7 satellite into a lower than planned orbit due to an upper stage cryogenic leak. The satellite couldn’t sustain operations and had to be de-orbited.

Two Blue Origin failures in two months and Wall Street reacted. ASTS stock dropped 18% in a single day, Deutsche Bank downgraded the stock and cut its price target, and analysts questioned whether AST could reach its target of 45 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026 without access to Blue Origin’s launch capacity.

Yesterday’s launch was the answer.

Why This Matters Beyond the Headlines

The stock moved 6% after the launch, which is fine. But the real story isn’t about share prices. It’s about what this launch demonstrates about how the space sector actually works.

AST SpaceMobile didn’t panic after the Blue Origin setbacks. They had a multi-partner launch strategy already in place – agreements with both SpaceX and Blue Origin, precisely because launch risk is a known variable in this industry. When one provider encountered problems, the constellation deployment continued on the other provider.

This is what operational maturity looks like. Not avoiding setbacks (they’re inevitable in space) but building your program so that no single failure can stop your deployment timeline.

BlueBirds 11, 12, and 13 are already in final preparations for shipment to Cape Canaveral. BlueBirds through 37 are in active production and assembly. The company’s manufacturing operation in Midland, Texas runs across over 500,000 square feet, supported by a workforce of more than 2,250 people, backed by 3,900+ patents.

The pipeline didn’t stop because a rocket blew up. The manufacturing kept running, the next satellites kept being built, and yesterday, three more went to orbit.

The SpaceX Factor

It’s worth noting whose rocket made yesterday’s launch work.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the most reliable operational rocket in the world. Booster B1077, which carried these three BlueBirds, has now flown 29 times. The rocket launches roughly every two to three days across all its customers. The reliability isn’t accidental – it’s the product of years of iteration, failure, investigation, and redesign. SpaceX famously lost a Falcon 9 on the pad in 2016 and came back stronger.

With SpaceX’s IPO now filed and surpassing a $1.75 trillion valuation, the company’s role as the space sector’s most critical infrastructure provider is only becoming more prominent. For companies like AST SpaceMobile that depend on reliable launch access, SpaceX’s track record is part of the business case.

What This Means for the Talent Market

Here’s where the bigger picture connects to hiring.

AST SpaceMobile now has 10 BlueBird satellites in orbit, with dozens more in production. The company is targeting 45 this year. Each satellite that reaches orbit moves the company closer to commercial service activation across the US, Canada, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Japan – with partners including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, and Rakuten.

That progression from constellation deployment to commercial operations creates a workforce shift. The company is moving from a build-and-launch phase to a build-launch-and-operate phase. The engineering talent needed for the second phase – network operations, spectrum management, ground segment software, commercial integration with mobile carriers – is different from the satellite manufacturing and launch integration talent that got them here.

AST SpaceMobile’s 2,250-person workforce will need to grow as the network moves toward service activation. And they’re not the only company in this position. Amazon’s Leo constellation is scaling in parallel. Starlink already operates over 10,000 satellites. The direct-to-device broadband market – which AST SpaceMobile is pioneering – is moving from concept to commercial reality, and every step forward creates demand for people who can build, operate, and sell these services.

The Resilience Story

There’s a broader lesson in what happened over the past three months that matters for anyone working in or thinking about joining the space sector.

In April, a satellite was lost. In May, a rocket exploded. Wall Street panicked. Analysts downgraded. The stock dropped by a third from its highs.

In June, three satellites launched successfully, the manufacturing pipeline kept running, and the company reaffirmed its deployment targets.

This is normal in the space sector – not comfortable, but normal. The companies that survive and scale are the ones that build redundancy into their plans, keep executing through setbacks, and don’t let one bad month define their trajectory. That resilience, that ability to keep building when the news is bad, is one of the most valuable qualities in the sector.

The Takeaway

Yesterday’s launch was a milestone for AST SpaceMobile. But it was also a reminder of something that the space sector demonstrates over and over: setbacks don’t define a company. What a company does after the setback is what matters.

AST SpaceMobile lost a satellite, lost access to a launch provider, weathered a stock crash – and three weeks later put three more spacecraft in orbit. The constellation is growing. The workforce is scaling. The commercial service is getting closer.

The space sector rewards companies that keep building. Yesterday was proof of that.

What the Largest IPO Means for the Space Talent Market: Space X

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On 12 June, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, in the largest IPO in history. It priced at $135 a share, raised around $75 billion, and by its market debut had jumped sharply to a valuation north of $2 trillion, with both institutional money and an unusually large retail allocation piling in. On paper, it made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

For a sector that spent decades being seen as government science rather than a real economy, this is a turning point. But the more interesting story for anyone hiring in space isn’t the headline number. It’s what happened to everyone else the same day, and what the whole episode signals about where the talent market goes next.

The same day SpaceX soared, the rest of the sector fell

While SpaceX surged, the rest of the listed space sector dropped. Rocket Lab and Planet Labs fell around 8%, Intuitive Machines lost over 10%, and AST SpaceMobile dropped more than 12% (Economic Times). Investors, having ridden a months-long rally in anticipation of the IPO, used the debut as the moment to take profits.

This isn’t a contradiction – it’s the market doing two things at once: validating the sector’s biggest player while questioning whether the valuations of everyone else have run ahead of the fundamentals. Space stocks are up between roughly a third and ninety percent this year. That kind of run invites exactly this kind of nervousness.

For a hiring leader, that combination, huge capital legitimisation paired with valuation anxiety, is the actual context you’re operating in. It isn’t a simple “everything is up and to the right” story. It’s a sector that just got far more visible and far more scrutinised at the same time.

What an IPO of this scale does to the talent market

Capital events reshape hiring, and one this large reshapes it broadly. Three effects matter.

The first is legitimacy.

A two-trillion-dollar listing changes how space is perceived by people who have never worked in it. Engineers, operators, and commercial leaders in adjacent industries, defense, big tech, autonomy, semiconductors now see space as a serious destination rather than a passion bet. That widens the candidate pool over time. It also means more people will be drawn to the sector for the wrong reasons, and screening for genuine commitment becomes more important, not less.

The second is intensity.

When the sector’s profile rises, every funded company’s hiring gets harder, not easier, because they are now competing for attention against a much louder backdrop. A strong systems engineer who was already weighing several offers is now also reading headlines about trillion-dollar valuations and wondering where the smart money, and the smart people, are going. The competition for the same finite group of experienced people sharpens.

The third is expectation.

Candidates read capital as a signal. A company raising or riding the wave of sector enthusiasm will find candidates asking harder questions about whether the funding is real, whether the roadmap is fundable, and whether the role still exists if the hype cools. The same valuation nervousness that hit the public markets on debut day shows up in candidate conversations as due diligence. People do their homework before they reply, and a great pitch now has to survive a sceptical read.

Why the sell-off matters more than the surge

It would be easy to write the IPO up as pure tailwind for hiring. More capital, more roles, more momentum. That’s part of the truth. But the same-day drop in the rest of the sector is the part worth paying attention to, because it tells you the market is already pricing in the gap between hype and delivery.

That gap is, ultimately, a talent question. The companies that justify their valuations are the ones that can actually execute, and execution is people. Capital can be raised in an afternoon. A team that can deliver a satellite constellation, a launch cadence, or a working payload takes years to build and cannot be conjured by a funding round. In a sector where investors are suddenly asking “can they really deliver?”, the answer is written in who a company has hired.

This is the quiet advantage available to companies that treat hiring as strategy rather than reaction. When the sector is euphoric, it is tempting to over-hire into the excitement. When it cools, it is tempting to freeze. Both are responses to the market’s mood rather than the company’s actual plan. The companies that come through this period strongest will be the ones that kept hiring the right people through both the surge and the wobble, because they understood that the team is the thing the valuation is ultimately betting on.

The takeaway

The largest IPO in history is a genuine milestone for space, and it deserves to be recognised as one. But the same day’s sell-off across the rest of the sector is the more instructive signal. It marks the moment the market started separating the companies that can deliver from the ones riding the narrative.

That separation runs on talent. Capital made the headlines this week. People will decide who actually lives up to them.

Why Space Engineers Leave the Primes for Fast-Growth Companies

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There’s a move we’re seeing a lot of right now: experienced engineers leaving the primes – the large, established players – for fast-growth commercial space companies. They’re rarely unhappy enough to be openly job-hunting. They’re just quietly ready for something different. And almost none of them show up anywhere as “open to work.”

It’s worth understanding what’s actually driving the move, because it’s not what most hiring managers assume.

The pull to a startup is pace, not pay

The reason these engineers move usually isn’t money. It’s that a large, established environment can be slow and sluggish – layers of process, decisions that take quarters, and a sense that an individual’s work disappears into a machine built for thousands of people.

A fast-growth company is the opposite, and that contrast is the entire appeal. It’s smaller, there’s less resource, and everyone has to be versatile (wear different hats and dig in to get the job done). For an engineer who’s spent years inside a slow system, that’s not a downside – it could be the thing they’ve been missing. The work feels load-bearing again because it is.

The progression matters too. A company scaling from 450 people toward 700 in eighteen months creates room that simply doesn’t exist at a prime, where the organisation chart above you is settled, and the path up is measured in decades. At a fast-growth company, the structure is still forming, and the people who join now are the ones who grow into it.

The adjustment from prime to startup is real

The same things that make the move exciting are the things that make it an adjustment, and the engineers who thrive tend to go in clear-eyed about that.

“Less resource” and “wear different hats” sound great in an interview. In practice, they mean you no longer have the depth of support a prime gave you. The process you quietly resented also caught your mistakes and spread the load. At a fast-growth company, you own your work end to end, which is exhilarating right up until it’s daunting – usually the same week.

The engineers who flourish are the ones who wanted the ownership and understood it came with the exposure. The ones who struggle wanted the autonomy without the weight. The freedom and the exposure are the same thing, and anyone being straight with a candidate will say so.

Why this talent pool is hard to reach

These people are employed, capable, and often not actively searching. They won’t appear in an inbound application pile, and they rarely switch on an “open to work” banner.

What they will do is watch. They’ll quietly follow a company, read what its people post, and build a picture over weeks before they ever respond to anything. By the time they reply to a message, they’ve usually been paying attention for a while.

That changes how you reach them. A cold spec and a salary number won’t move someone who isn’t looking. What moves them is a credible, sustained picture of the thing they actually want: real ownership, technical work that matters, and a company growing fast enough that joining now means growing with it. The engineers leaving the primes aren’t running from a “bad job”, but they want a better-fitting one. The companies that understand the difference are the ones that land them.

Why Space Companies Lose Their Best Candidates at the Offer Stage

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A hiring process can do everything right and still lose. The role gets scoped well, the search runs clean, the right engineer comes through, the interviews go well, everyone agrees this is the one. And then the offer takes weeks to sign off, and the candidate is gone.

It is one of the most avoidable ways to lose a hire, and in the current market, it is happening more, not less.

The offer stage is where speed matters most, and where companies slow down most

Most hiring processes speed up where it’s easy and slow down where it counts. The early stages move quickly because they are easy. Posting the role, screening, first interviews, all of it has momentum because nothing is at stake yet. Then, when a strong candidate emerges and the decision actually matters, the process slows to a crawl exactly when it should accelerate.

The sign-off is where it stalls. The hiring manager is ready, but the offer needs finance to confirm the band, a founder to approve the equity, and sometimes a parent company in another timezone to sign. Each step is reasonable on its own, but together they can turn into days, sometimes weeks, worth of back and forth.

The company knows this to be diligence, but the candidate just sees it as silence.

A good candidate in space is not waiting for you

The engineer you want is not sitting at home hoping you call back. In the space sector right now, a strong systems engineer or GNC lead is in two or three other processes at the same time, because every company is hiring, and the qualified pool is small. They have options, and the options are moving.

So a multi-week gap is not neutral time – it’s time during which someone else closes them. While you are routing the offer for internal approval, a competitor who can sign in 48 hours has already made theirs. The candidate doesn’t even have to ‘prefer’ the other company – they just have to get a real offer in hand before yours arrives, and the decision often gets made for you.

This compounds with something we have written about elsewhere: candidate attention is the scarce resource in this market. It is hard enough to get a strong engineer to engage at all. Having earned that, losing them to your own internal timeline is a self-inflicted wound.

“On hold” is not the safe option it looks like

There is a slower version of the same mistake. A role gets to final stage, a good candidate is ready, and then the company puts the search on hold. Budget needs reconfirming, priorities are shifting, leadership wants to wait a quarter. Pausing feels cautious, like preserving optionality until the picture is clearer.

It does the opposite because the candidate at final stage does not pause with you. They take another offer, and the relationship cools. When the role reopens a few months later, the person you wanted is placed elsewhere, and the pipeline you built has dispersed.

Pausing doesn’t always protect your options, but it can remove them. The only way to keep a candidate as an option is to decide while they’re still available.

What this actually asks of a company

The fix is not to rush the decision or lower the bar; it’s to make sure the parts of the process that have nothing to do with candidate quality are not the parts that cost you the candidate.

That means knowing your salary bands before you open the search, not negotiating them after the final interview. It means having equity sign-off authority sit with someone who is actually in the process, or at least reachable inside a candidate’s decision window. It means treating an offer for a strong candidate as the urgent thing it is, rather than one more item in an approval queue.

This requires seeing the offer stage for what it is. It is not the formality at the end of the search – it is the search. Everything before it only earns you the right to move fast when it counts.

The Hidden Space Talent Pool NASA’s Budget Fight Left Behind

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For most of 2025, the question hanging over NASA was how deep the cuts would go. The administration’s budget request proposed slashing the agency’s funding by nearly a quarter and its workforce by roughly a third. Then, in January 2026, Congress did something close to a full reversal – passing a $24.4 billion budget that rejected almost all of the proposed reductions and kept NASA funded at close to the prior year.

On paper, that looks like a story with a happy ending and no hiring consequence, but it isn’t. By the time the budget was restored, a great deal had already happened to the workforce – and the people who left aren’t coming back just because the funding did.

The people left before the money came back.

While the funding fight played out, more than 3,800 NASA employees had already taken voluntary exits (deferred-resignation offers, early retirements, separation incentives) with the agency’s headcount projected to fall toward 14,000 in early 2026. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab ran a round of involuntary layoffs on top of that and ended remote work for thousands.

Those exits are the key, because they are permanent in a way the budget never was. A funding cut can be proposed one year and reversed the next – and that is exactly what happened. But a retirement cannot be un-signed. When an experienced engineer accepted a package in late 2025, they left the agency for good; the January budget reversal protected the missions and programs they used to work on, but it did nothing to bring that person back. The money returned, but the people who had already walked did not.

So the workforce drawdown is real and largely irreversible, even though the budget cut that supposedly caused it mostly didn’t happen. And the uncertainty hasn’t fully closed either: the FY2027 request released in April has reopened the same questions, proposing another deep science cut. For a slice of NASA’s experienced workforce, two years of not knowing has been reason enough to move.

Why this pool is hidden.

A company hiring senior space talent tends to look where availability is visible: candidates marked “open to work,” active applicants, people who respond to outreach. That filter misses this pool almost entirely.

The people who left NASA through voluntary programs did not get laid off – they took a considered package and stepped out on their own terms, often with no urgency to look for a new position. They aren’t refreshing job boards and lots of them aren’t “looking” at all. What they are doing is weighing what is next while the financial pressure to decide quickly simply isn’t there. By every signal a standard search relies on, they look unavailable. But actually, they are some of the most movable senior people in the market right now, because the thing anchoring them to a long government career has loosened.

This is the same pattern our delivery team sees in the most specialised corners of space engineering: the strongest candidates are almost never the ones raising their hands. They are sourced, not applied. The best computational and systems people in this sector rarely appear on a job board, because they are employed, capable, and not actively searching – which is precisely what makes them worth reaching. The post-NASA pool is a large, suddenly-formed version of exactly that dynamic.

The seniority is the second half of the story.

It is not only that this pool is hidden, it’s also who’s in it. Voluntary exit programs and early retirements skew toward experienced people – the engineers and program leaders with enough tenure to have the option, enough behind them to weigh it seriously, and enough seniority that they are normally almost impossible to pry loose from a stable government post. That profile is the hardest thing to hire in the commercial space sector: people who have run real programs, navigated mission assurance, and operated in environments where failure has real consequences.

In an ordinary year, a growth-stage space company has little chance of moving someone with twenty years inside a NASA center. The career incentives all point the other way. What changed is not that these people suddenly became reachable through normal channels; it is that a meaningful number of them have already stepped outside the institution and are deciding what to do with the next decade. The window where they are both available and not yet committed is open, and it is not permanent.

What this means for how you hire.

The instinct, reading “NASA workforce shrinking,” is to wait for the resumes to arrive, but they mostly won’t – not from the people you actually want. This pool does not surface through inbound – it has to be mapped and approached directly. It required an understanding of what these candidates are weighing up as it’s not a desperate move after a layoff, but a deliberate decision about whether commercial space is where their experience matters most.

That also shapes the pitch. Someone who chose to leave a mission they cared about is not motivated by the same things as someone escaping a bad situation. They are asking whether the work is real, whether their experience will be used rather than diluted, and whether the company actually ships. Companies that approach this pool as if it were a flood of available labour will misread it. The ones that treat it as a group of experienced people making a considered choice (and reach them before they commit elsewhere) will hire engineers they could not have touched eighteen months ago.

For companies building in commercial space, this gap is one of the most interesting talent openings of the year – if you know it’s there.