What is RSS?

Very few of you reading this will ever actually work in space - we have another 50 years before a few percent of working people do that. But if you want to be an Astronaut (Cosmonaut, Taikonaut), you have two options:

 

1  Get a good education in science or technology, a pilots licence, diving qualifications, and wait in line with millions of other people.

2  Go into highly lucrative business of any kind (except anything to do with space), save up 20-30 million, and buy a ticket.  

 

This is a lot easier than option 1. If you can spare a few hundred billion, you could be the first person to walk on Mars. (If you need a good engineer to help you, I can think of one or two). On the other hand, if you want to get a bit closer to the space business, perhaps sending some other poor fool to Mars, you need to think carefully about your education and training choices, and apply for jobs with the right outfits. Let's define the Space business, as a whole, to see where the careers are.

 Space activities are still dominated by Governments, through their Space Agencies. The Agencies run scientific missions and encourage the development of space technology. They do not make any money, and therefore their programmes depend entirely upon political support. They do what no sensible profit making enterprise would do - take big risks, which result in the most spectacular successes (soft landing a probe on the surface of Titan, the mysterious moon of Saturn) and failures (Beagle2 crashing into Mars). Even though commercial entities did most of the work, they did so to make a profit or for strategic commercial reasons. Agencies are also the only bodies to run manned spaceflight programmes. The near exception is Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic who are selling sub-orbital flights for the first time more than 40 years after a government achieved it.

 

The worlds leading national space agencies are in the US, Russia and China, with a club of European countries subscribing to the European Space Agency.. There are a few others, with the Canadian Space Agency being notable for its exceptional bang-for-buck. (The UK does not have a Space Agency). Space Agencies employ civil servants (direct employees) and contractors (who look like employees, but can be dispensed with at short notice). There is a limit to what you can do as a contractor, so the more senior, important jobs are done by civil servants. Strangely, contractors tend to be more experienced in practical things than civil servants.  It is a lot easier to get a job with a company supplying contractors to a Space Agency than it is to get a staff job. Space Agencies oversee or supervise scientific or technology programmes - if you want to do research or make spaceships, Agency jobs are a bit too abstracted from where the real work is done (for ESA - for NASA less so). The exceptions are the 'Ops' jobs, where testing is done and missions are controlled - you get to sit in a comfy chair, wear a headset, talk on the loops, and make expensive typing mistakes. Space Agencies also employ managers, administrators, IT people, accountants, lawyers, doctors, as well as engineers and scientists. Agencies have recruitment websites, but you need also to find the 'Work Order Contractor' recruitment websites. I'm not going to give them a free advertisement here, they are easy to come across.

Big (Tier One) Industry and their suppliers

These people make their money building spacecraft and launchers. There are not many of them worldwide, and they are large engineering organisations. Some of them employ contractors for similar reasons given above.  ESA calls these Prime Contractors which emphasises that there are other sorts of contractors - subcontractors. In fact, most of the bits of a spacecraft assembled by a Prime are made by subcontractors who specialise. Most of the people worldwide who work in the space industry specialise in one product or another - thrusters, momentum wheels, startrackers, TWTs, booms, etc, and in the process get very good at it. So, for an real engineer, at entry level, the subcos is where it's at.

These entities use space technology - for broadcast, telecoms, commercial remote sensing, navigation products. Working for them is space related, yes, but firmly Earth bound. You do not have to have your head above the stratosphere to succeed. Space Research organisations These academic outfits are where it all started, and they continue to use their imaginations to go further and further into the Universe. Some of them (like mine) build hardware to go to new and exotic places, like through the coma of comets, onto the surface of asteroids or into outer planet moon subsurface oceans. You need to be a real hardcore scientist (physicist, astronomer, etc) or engineer to get in with these guys. But be warned - they're always short of money, so no big bucks are to be made.

Good Luck - see you at my next interview panel!


Tim S