Full Employment by Orbit: How Space-Tech Can Bend Unemployment Toward Historic Lows
If space flights and launch costs drop significantly, more humans will have the opportunity to work in space and on the Moon as new industries will form and new markets will be served.
Credit: Bradley Dunn on Unsplash
Space work uses new skills—but also today’s trades—to create broad-based jobs fast
The central labour question is simple: can the space economy push unemployment structurally lower rather than just riding the business cycle? The evidence suggests “yes,” if we treat space as an industrial strategy—one that needs welders, electricians, machinists, software engineers and roboticists, but also planners, safety specialists, project managers and compliance staff. In other words: new capabilities atop a highly familiar skills base.
Start with where we are. The Space Foundation’s latest workforce snapshots show the US space sector at roughly 222,300 jobs in 2023, up 4.8% year-on-year, with Europe’s space workforce +66% since 2013—clear signs that the labour engine is already humming. The UK Space Agency’s Size & Health report records ~55,550 direct space jobs in 2022/23, and shows how each 100 direct roles supports 147 more across suppliers and services—an employment multiplier that turns specialist hiring into broad-based work.
The public–private flywheel matters. NASA’s FY-2023 economic impact—$75.6B in output and ~304,800 jobs supported—illustrates how modest public budgets, channelled into anchor missions and standards, spill over into supply chains and local job markets. In Europe, evaluations of ESA participation estimate 11.8:1 long-run GVA returns for the UK (with sensible caveats on spillover timing), again signalling employment and capability effects that outlast any single programme.
A grounded vignette: the UK’s Level-6 Space Systems Engineering degree apprenticeship launched by BAE Systems and the University of Portsmouth. Apprentices are paid while earning a BSc, then step directly into satellite manufacturing and test roles—precisely the mix of “earn while you learn” that widens the funnel beyond traditional STEM pipelines. This is replicable: national space agencies and primes can pair cluster-based training with guaranteed interview schemes for completers.
So what does GTM (go-to-market) strategies for jobs look like?
Segmentation: upstream manufacturing (structures, thermal, avionics), downstream services (Earth observation analytics, satcom), and “new infra” (in-space manufacturing, cislunar logistics). Each segment maps to distinct training pathways.
Packaging: degree apprenticeships + short, stackable credentials (robotic assembly, human-rating standards) that carry credit across employers. Public procurement can require recognised micro-credentials in bids.
Channels: regional cluster academies (colleges + primes + SMEs), with public co-funding tied to placement rates and diversity targets.
Adoption levers: interoperability standards open the supply base so SMEs can win sub-systems; that broadens hiring beyond a few incumbents.
Three policy moves push unemployment toward historic lows. First, scale apprenticeships and recognition-of-prior-learning so tradespeople (welding, machining, HV electrical) can pivot into space without starting over. Second, extend anchor procurement to second- and third-tier suppliers, pairing orders with workforce grants. Third, publish skills taxonomies aligned to open standards (power/data/prop interfaces) so training maps cleanly onto real work.
Risks exist—talent shortages and uneven regional participation—but they are solvable with transparent pipelines. If we keep space hiring tethered to standards, shared infrastructure and open interfaces, the labour demand becomes far larger than “rockets”: thousands of enduring roles across design, build, test, operate, insure and regulate. That’s how you convert a frontier into a jobs flywheel.
