Okay, so you saw the news that a private company is building an actual space station, and now you can’t stop thinking about it. I get it. When I hear “space station,” my brain still jumps straight to astronauts in white suits. But here’s the thing I want you to know before you read another word: figuring out how to get a job at Axiom Space does not mean you need a PhD in orbital mechanics. Axiom is one of the fastest-growing names in commercial space right now, and it needs way more than astronauts to build a station in orbit. It needs people like you.
What Axiom Space Actually Does
Axiom Space is a Houston-based company building Axiom Station, a private space station meant to fly free of the International Space Station as the ISS heads toward retirement. The company was started by Michael Suffredini, who used to run the ISS program at NASA, so this isn’t some scrappy garage startup. It’s a real, funded, hiring company. Axiom recently pulled in $350 million to speed up work on the station and on new spacesuits for NASA’s Artemis moon missions. That’s not small money. That’s a company scaling up fast, and fast growth means open roles, now.
Axiom isn’t the only company chasing this goal, either. A handful of companies are racing to build the next generation of space stations before the ISS retires, and NASA has been handing out contracts to keep that competition moving. That’s actually good news for you. More companies building real hardware means more real jobs opening up across the industry, not just at one address in Houston.
They’ve also flown multiple private astronaut missions to the ISS already, so this isn’t hypothetical. People are working there today, building hardware, running missions, and yes, doing the marketing, finance, and people-ops work that keeps any company running.
You Don’t Need to Be a Rocket Scientist
Here’s a stat that changes how a lot of people think about this: about 44 percent of jobs in the space industry are non-technical. Read that again. Almost half. That means legal, finance, communications, human resources, supply chain, program management, and customer relations all have a real seat at the table at a company like Axiom. If your first thought when you hear “space station” is “well, I’m not an engineer, so this isn’t for me,” I want you to drop that thought right now. It’s just not true.
That doesn’t mean the engineering side isn’t there too, because it definitely is. It just means you have more than one door in.
The Technical Roles Building the Station
On the engineering side, Axiom hires for roles like mechanical and structural engineers, life support and environmental control engineers, spacesuit designers, software engineers who write the code that keeps a station running, and systems engineers who make sure every piece talks to every other piece. If you love the idea of building something that will actually fly in orbit, this is where you’d land.
These roles usually want a degree in aerospace, mechanical, or electrical engineering, or computer science for the software side. But even here, internships and hands-on project experience can carry real weight, especially if you’re early in your career.
The Non-Technical Roles That Keep Everything Moving
This is the part people skip past, and they shouldn’t. Axiom needs program managers to keep massive projects on schedule. It needs business development people to land contracts. It needs communications and marketing people to tell the world what’s happening. It needs HR to hire all these people in the first place, and finance to keep the company funded and healthy. None of these roles require you to run orbital mechanics equations, and all of them are real, possible ways to work at a company literally building a space station.
What Axiom Is Actually Looking For
Forget the idea that you need a flawless resume with “astronaut” already on it. What Axiom and companies like it actually look for is simpler: can you do the job, do you care about the mission, and can you work well with a team moving fast under pressure. Show them real project experience, whether that’s a class project, a hackathon, an internship, or work you did in a completely different industry that taught you how to manage complexity. Space companies love people who bring outside experience in, because building a space station takes finance people, safety people, and legal people just as much as it takes engineers.
Building a Resume That Gets Noticed
Your resume is the first conversation you have with a hiring manager, and it needs to work hard. Keep it specific. Instead of “worked on a team project,” say what you built, what problem it solved, and what the result was. If you’re a career changer, draw a straight line between what you did before and what the new role needs, even if the industries look nothing alike on paper. A What Color Is Your Parachute (#ad): This career-change classic is genuinely useful if you’re trying to translate skills from a totally different field into something a space company will recognize as valuable.
Skills Worth Building Right Now
You don’t have to wait for a job offer to start building the skills that make you a stronger candidate. If you’re eyeing a technical role, even a little coding ability goes a long way, since software touches almost everything a modern space company builds. A lot of people I talk to start with Python because it’s approachable and it shows up everywhere in this industry, from data analysis to mission software. Python Crash Course (#ad): A clear, beginner-friendly way to pick up real coding skills, even if you’ve never written a line of code before.
How to Actually Get Your Foot in the Door
Start with internships. Axiom and its peers regularly bring on interns and co-ops, and that’s the easiest possible way to get real experience on your resume and a real contact inside the company. If an internship isn’t open right now, look for adjacent companies in the Houston aerospace corridor, since so much of this industry runs on people who know people. Go to space industry meetups, join student chapters of groups like AIAA, and don’t be shy about messaging people on LinkedIn who have the job you want. Most people in this industry got their start because someone gave them a chance, and most of them are happy to pay that forward.
Where to Watch for Openings
Check the careers page on Axiom Space’s own site first, since that’s where new roles land before anywhere else. From there, set up alerts on job boards that track aerospace roles specifically, since a general job search site can bury a space listing under a thousand unrelated results. LinkedIn is honestly one of your best tools here, not just for job postings but for seeing who works there now, what their background looks like, and how they talk about the work. That’s real information you can use to shape your own application.
What It’s Actually Like to Work There
Working at a company building a first-of-its-kind space station is not a slow, quiet job. It moves fast, priorities shift, and you’re often building the process at the same time you’re doing the work. That’s exciting if you like solving new problems, and it can be a lot if you need everything mapped out in advance. Most people I’ve talked to who work in commercial space say the tradeoff is worth it. You get to point at something in the sky one day and say you helped build it.
It also means the team is still small enough that one person can genuinely shape how things get done. You’re not just a cog moving paperwork through a system that already exists. You’re often helping build the system itself, which is rare at almost any other point in a career.
Helpful Resources for Aspiring Space Professionals
A few tools that make this whole process easier, whether you’re studying up or getting ready for interviews:
- Aerospace Engineering For Dummies (#ad): A friendly, no-jargon introduction to the fundamentals, great if you want to understand the technical side without needing an engineering degree first.
- Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones (#ad): Solid for quiet, focused study sessions or for a remote video interview where you need clean audio and zero background noise.
Your Next Step
You don’t need to have it all figured out today. Pick one small, real step and take it this week. Update your resume with one real project. Follow Axiom Space on LinkedIn and watch for openings. Message one person who works in commercial space and ask them how they got started. That’s it. That’s how nearly everyone who works at a space company now got their start, one small step at a time. You can do this.
