If you’ve been dreaming about a space career built around orbit itself — not just launching things into space, but living and working in it — you’re in luck. This is arguably the most interesting moment in the history of space stations. The International Space Station is winding down toward retirement later this decade, and in its place a small fleet of new stations, run by both governments and private companies, is racing to take over. Each one is hiring, and each one needs a different mix of talent. If you’re trying to figure out where space station careers are headed and how to get in the door, here’s a clear-eyed look at who’s building what — and who’s hiring.
The New Space Station Race: Why It Matters for Your Career
For decades, “space station” meant one thing: the ISS, a single government-led outpost orbiting 250 miles up. That era is ending. NASA has committed to retiring the ISS around 2030 and wants commercial stations ready to take its place, which has kicked off a genuine building boom. At the same time, China has stood up its own permanently crewed station, and a handful of private companies are racing to launch modules of their own. For job seekers, this matters enormously: instead of one employer (NASA, essentially) hiring for space station work, there are now half a dozen organizations — from government agencies to venture-backed startups — competing for engineers, operators, scientists, and business talent. More competition among employers is good news for you.
The International Space Station (ISS): The Original Blueprint
The ISS is still the gold standard for hands-on experience, and it will remain operational for a few more years before a planned deorbit. NASA, Boeing, and the ISS National Laboratory continue to hire mission operations specialists, payload integration engineers, and life-support systems technicians to keep it running safely through its final chapter. Working an ISS-adjacent role today is also one of the best ways to build a resume that later-stage commercial stations will want, since so much of what comes next is modeled directly on ISS operations and safety culture.
China’s Tiangong Space Station: A Growing Talent Pipeline
Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) has been continuously crewed since 2022 and represents a fully independent human spaceflight program. While direct employment for most international readers isn’t realistic here, Tiangong is worth understanding because it demonstrates a second, parallel track for space station careers — one built through China’s national space agency, its aerospace universities, and state-affiliated contractors. If you’re a student outside the U.S. weighing where space infrastructure careers are heading globally, it’s a useful data point: multiple countries are now investing in sovereign orbital capability, which means space station-related hiring is becoming a worldwide trend, not just a U.S. one.
Axiom Space: Building the First Commercial Space Station
Axiom Space is the furthest along of the U.S. commercial contenders. Its plan is to attach modules directly to the ISS first, then detach to form an independent free-flying station once the ISS retires. Houston-based Axiom has been aggressively hiring across spacecraft design, life-support engineering, mission operations, and its increasingly high-profile private astronaut program. Because Axiom already flies missions and builds real hardware today, it’s one of the more accessible commercial space station employers for engineers and operations professionals looking to break in now rather than waiting years for a company to reach flight status.
Orbital Reef: A Mixed-Use Business Park in Orbit
Orbital Reef is the joint venture between Blue Origin and Sierra Space, designed as a “mixed-use business park” in low Earth orbit for research, manufacturing, and tourism. Because it’s a partnership, hiring happens across two companies with different cultures: Blue Origin’s engineering-heavy, deliberate pace, and Sierra Space’s faster-moving Dream Chaser and inflatable-habitat teams. Roles span structural engineering, environmental control and life-support systems (ECLSS), business development for commercial tenants, and operations planning. If you’re drawn to the commercial/business side of space as much as the engineering side, Orbital Reef’s tenant-based business model creates roles that simply don’t exist at government agencies.
Starlab: The Research-First Station
Starlab, backed by Voyager Technologies (formerly Voyager Space) and Airbus, is positioning itself as the research and biotech-focused successor to the ISS National Lab. Its hiring emphasizes payload and research operations, microgravity science support, and international partnerships, since Airbus brings a strong European aerospace pipeline into the mix. For candidates with a life-sciences, materials-science, or research-operations background who assumed “space station career” only meant mechanical or aerospace engineering, Starlab is a good reminder that orbital research infrastructure needs scientists just as much as it needs engineers.
Vast’s Haven-1: The Scrappy Startup Approach
Vast is the newest and scrappiest name on this list, aiming to launch Haven-1, a single-module commercial station, ahead of its larger competitors, before scaling up to a rotating, artificial-gravity station down the line. Startups like Vast tend to hire fast and give early employees unusually broad responsibility — a structural engineer might also touch integration and test, and a software engineer might own flight software end to end. If you want the steepest learning curve and don’t mind startup pace and uncertainty, this is the kind of company where a motivated early-career engineer can end up owning far more than their title suggests.
What Space Station Careers Actually Look Like Day to Day
It’s worth demystifying what these jobs actually involve, because “space station career” conjures images of astronauts when the overwhelming majority of roles are ground-based. Mission operators sit in control rooms monitoring telemetry and choreographing crew schedules. ECLSS engineers design and test the systems that keep air breathable and water drinkable. Structural and thermal engineers make sure modules survive launch loads and the extreme temperature swings of orbit. Integration and test technicians physically build and verify hardware before it ever leaves the ground. And a growing slice of the workforce — program managers, business development leads, legal and regulatory specialists — makes the commercial side of these ventures function as businesses, not just engineering projects.
Skills and Credentials That Get You Noticed
Because these are inherently multidisciplinary, cross-team programs, systems-engineering fluency is one of the most transferable skills you can bring, even if your degree is in a narrower discipline like mechanical or electrical engineering. A resource like Systems Engineering For Dummies (#ad) is a genuinely useful starting point: it explains how requirements, interfaces, and verification plans tie a complex program together, which is exactly the vocabulary hiring managers at Axiom, Orbital Reef, and Starlab expect candidates to have. Beyond systems thinking, familiarity with CAD tools, basic orbital mechanics, and — increasingly — data analysis for telemetry and mission planning will set you apart. You don’t need to master all of it before applying; you need enough fluency to speak the language in an interview.
How to Position Yourself for These Roles Now
Start by treating this moment as an advantage rather than an obstacle: because so many organizations are hiring for similar roles at once, you can apply broadly without betting your whole career on one company reaching flight status. Follow each program’s hardware milestones closely (module deliveries, docking demonstrations, crewed flight announcements) and tailor your resume language to match the specific subsystem or mission phase each company is focused on right now. Internships and co-ops at NASA, Axiom, or Sierra Space are some of the highest-leverage ways to get a foot in the door, since so much hiring for full-time roles happens from within existing internship pipelines. And don’t underestimate direct outreach — this is still a small enough industry that a thoughtful, specific message to an engineer or recruiter on a program you admire can go further than a cold application through a careers portal.
Helpful Resources for Aspiring Space Professionals
A few tools and resources that consistently help people preparing for space station and space infrastructure careers:
1. Estes Space Station Model Building Kit (#ad): A hands-on way to build intuition for module geometry, docking interfaces, and structural layout — genuinely useful for visual learners studying spacecraft design, and a fun way to talk about your interests in an interview.
2. TI-Nspire CX II CAS Graphing Calculator (#ad): A reliable workhorse for orbital mechanics, thermal, and structural coursework that many engineering programs require or recommend for exams and coursework.
3. Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones (#ad): Space station programs run on constant video calls across time zones and partner companies — good noise-cancelling headphones make a real difference for focus during study sessions and remote interviews alike.
Your Next Step
The space station landscape is shifting faster than it has in twenty years, and that instability is exactly what creates opportunity for people trying to break in. Pick one or two programs from this list that genuinely excite you, follow their engineering teams and recruiters, and start building the systems-engineering vocabulary that every one of these organizations is looking for. You don’t need to have it all figured out today — you just need to take the next concrete step, whether that’s an internship application, a coursework project, or a message to someone doing the work you want to do. The stations being built right now will need thousands of people to run them for decades to come, and there’s no reason one of them shouldn’t be you.
