A quarter of the space workforce is nearing retirement age. Only 7% is under 25. That is not simply a hiring problem. It is a structural challenge for an industry trying to scale at unprecedented speed. Why the Space Industry Workforce Gap Is Getting Worse The Space Foundation's CEO put it plainly in 2026: "That is not a sustainable path." And the numbers back it up. Around 25% of the global space workforce is approaching retirement while the industry is scaling faster than a

European space investment grew by more than 600% in the first half of 2026. The talent pool did not grow with it, and location-based hiring policies are making it even smaller. Why the European Space Industry Talent Shortage Is Getting Worse Across Europe in H1 2026, €2.9 billion was raised across 33 funding rounds involving 30 companies. And many of those companies are looking for exactly the same talent. Systems Engineers. Product Assurance. AIT. RF. GNC. Flight Dynamics. S

Most startup hiring advice is written for SaaS companies. Hire an engineer, then a marketer, then a salesperson. Scale the go-to-market machine. That playbook does not apply to deep tech. If you are building satellites, propulsion systems, Earth observation platforms, or space hardware, your first 10 hires look fundamentally different because you are building physical systems with long development cycles, specialised engineering requirements, and regulatory constraints that s

This is the story of a single engagement that lasted over a decade. It started with a pre-revenue satellite company that had 12 employees and an ambitious plan to build a new operator from the ground up. It ended with a publicly listed international space company valued at approximately $1.8 billion at IPO, with more than 300 people. I was involved at both ends of that journey and at several points between. This is what that looked like in practice. The Starting Point and Why

You know you need help with hiring. You have looked at recruitment agencies, considered hiring a full-time Head of Talent, and now someone has mentioned the retainer model. It sounds interesting but also vague. What exactly are you paying for? What happens between hires? And how do you know whether it is working? These are the questions I get most often from founders and HR leaders before they engage with a talent advisor. They are good questions, and the fact that most advis

SpaceX just announced another wave of hiring. Amazon Leo (formally known as project kuiper) is scaling up. Defence primes are offering retention packages that look more like ransom payments. And you are sitting in a 40-person space startup trying to hire a systems engineer who has actually seen a full spacecraft programme from requirements through to operations. Welcome to deep tech recruitment in 2026. I have worked in this space for over 25 years, helping companies across s

Founder-led hiring works beautifully until it does not. And most founders do not notice the transition until they are already months behind on their roadmap. The Startup Hiring Bottleneck That Nobody Talks About Every startup goes through the same progression. In the early days, the founder hires everyone personally. They write job descriptions, source candidates through their network, run interviews, and close offers. It works because the founder knows the business better th

In the early stages, most startups hire reactively. A founder identifies a need, writes a job description, advertises the role, interviews candidates based on instinct, and makes an offer. It's a perfectly understandable approach when the team is small. However, as the business grows to 30 employees or more, the lack of a structured hiring strategy begins to create bottlenecks, inconsistent hiring decisions and slower growth. The problem is not that founders are bad at hirin

The conversation about remote work in the space industry tends to go one of two ways. Either "we build hardware, everyone needs to be on site" or "it is 2026, why would anyone need to be in an office?" Both positions miss the reality, and getting it wrong in either direction is costing space startups the candidates they need most. In this article Why Remote Work in the Space Industry Is Different from Software How Distributed Teams in Aerospace Actually Work in 2026 The Secur

If you are receiving hundreds of applications and none of them are right, the problem is not the talent pool. It is your job description. This is something I see constantly when working with space and deep tech startups. The founder or hiring manager writes a job description by listing every skill, tool, and qualification they can think of, publishes it on LinkedIn, and then wonders why the only people who apply are either wildly underqualified or completely wrong for the rol