The space economy’s stellar growth is outstripping its workforce pipeline, even as advances in AI and automation boost productivity.
Businesses and government agencies are struggling to find the engineers, cleared workers and mid-career managers needed to turn surging investment and demand into spacecraft and services.
Smallsat-related private funding alone reached roughly $11.5 billion in 2025, according to Novaspace, with plenty more likely to come as an estimated 16,900 satellites under 500 kilograms are expected to launch over the coming decade.
Apex, Muon and other satellite makers are frantically ramping up production, as is much of the broader industry, but these ambitions depend on finding enough skilled people to keep pace with the market’s rapid expansion.
“The biggest need is clearable workforce,” said Heather Pringle, CEO of the non-profit Space Foundation. “That’s first and foremost — and that’s the hardest to get.”
Engineering positions are also a major vulnerability.
“We know that there’s 25% of the workforce [that] is nearing retirement age and only 7% of the space workforce is under 25,” Pringle told SpaceNews. “That is not a sustainable path.”
And companies big and small are struggling to hire across various career stages.
“It’s not just getting people in the pipeline,” Pringle said, “it’s keeping them,” with mid-management one of the critical layers that has become difficult to maintain.
Coming to a head
The industry has long bemoaned the struggle to attract enough engineering talent, but Pringle said the issue has become even more acute in recent years.
Meanwhile, China continues to far outpace the United States in the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates.
“If we don’t fill the workforce, we’re going to stop innovating,” Pringle warned, and “then we’re going to have to depend on others,” reducing options for economic growth and national security.
SpaceX’s blockbuster June IPO has expanded talent mobility but also made top positions even more expensive, said Scott Ryan, chief revenue officer at government contracting recruitment marketing agency HireClix.
Coupled with a Space Force hiring push to expand U.S. capabilities, Ryan said the industry is evolving from a specialized engineering niche into a scaled, commercial-and-national-security labor market that its talent pipeline is not ready to support.
“The unfilled roles picture in the federal space contracting world is more severe than most realize, and it is a story of demand outpacing supply, not lack of investment,” he said.
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in fiscal 2025 the Space Force had filled about 75% of the roughly 18,000 positions deemed necessary to carry out its missions.
“Delve into the contracting side specifically, and the gap is even starker,” Ryan continued.
At Space Systems Command (SSC), around 40% of jobs in the contracting corps currently sit empty, with leadership targeting a reduction to roughly 20%, he said.
“That is the number I would lead with when talking to contractors and primes. It is the clearest signal that the acquisition workforce supporting space programs is stretched thin.”
Across the Atlantic, the ADS Group trade association for the U.K.’s aerospace, defense, security and space sectors says the country averages about 10,000 unfilled technical vacancies across those industries each year.
How did we get here?
For the U.S. government, Ryan highlighted two colliding forces. On one hand, missions are scaling rapidly. The Space Force is asking Congress to fund roughly 40% more civilian positions in fiscal 2027 than the previous year to support expanded missions, ranging from missile warning to offensive cyber operations.
On the other, the federal space workforce is losing experienced personnel, with NASA reducing its civil servant workforce by nearly 22% in 2025.
“Layer on top of that a systemic problem,” Ryan added.
“GAO found the Space Force doesn’t even have a reliable process to track how many contractor personnel support it or what work they perform, which means workforce planning across government and contractor teams is happening partially blind.”
The hardest roles to fill reflect the broader defense tech talent crunch, he said, pointing to how Space Force officials have identified shortages in cybersecurity and intelligence, while SSC is recruiting across cyber, program and project management and other acquisition-related disciplines.
Maj. Amol Rathod speaks with an attendee during STARCOM’s civilian hiring event hosted at Patrick Space Force Base on April 21. Credit: U.S. Space Force / Brandon Kalloo Sanes
Smallsat squeeze
The talent pressure is particularly prominent in the smallsat market.
“The smallsat market is entering a more mature phase, where industrial maturity, production readiness, and secure access to demand will determine who succeeds,” said Novaspace senior consultant Julie Taillandier in an April 23 news release accompanying its report on the industry.
“The key question is no longer who has a concept, but who can execute at scale.”
According to a recent job-postings analysis from workforce analytics provider Revelio, Labs, integration, reliability and hardware engineers are among the most in-demand roles across the space economy.
“These disciplines aren’t unique to smallsats,” said Nain Abdi, co-founder of engineering hiring platform Colare, “but constellation production consumes them in unprecedented quantities.”
He added: “Senior engineering time is probably the scarcest and one of the most expensive resources at these companies, since projects are tied to fixed contract deadlines, so reducing the use of senior engineering time for hiring is a key priority.”
Tackling the challenge
Space and defense make up half of the client base for Colare, which provides simulation-based assessments designed to vet candidates before senior engineers are pulled away from their work to interview them.
According to Abdi, one space client requires every candidate to complete overnight take-home projects and six-hour onsite interviews before they’re hired.
“At another space company, engineers revolted over having no way to test [Electronic Computer-Aided Design] skills, so the company started shipping laptops to candidates’ homes and having a senior engineer stand behind them to observe, essentially proctoring the test in person,” he recalled.
“The craziest hiring stories being heard consistently trace back to the space and defense industry.”
Pringle called for more investment in the next generation of workers to avoid an even wider gap as older employees retire.
However, recruiting is only part of the equation.
“This gap doesn’t close on its own, and it likely widens before it narrows given the pace of mission growth versus attrition,” Ryan said.
“The contractors who win the next few years will be the ones who treat this as a marketing and visibility problem, not just a recruiting one,” he added.
That means building up an employer brand and targeting candidate pipelines specifically for cleared, technical and program-management talent, “rather than relying on traditional job postings to compete with SpaceX-style compensation and mission appeal.”
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