Two reentry capsules just flew on one rideshare. Coming home from orbit is becoming a business.
SpaceX's Starfall and Varda's W-7 flew together on Bandwagon-5. Reentry is going from rare to routine, and the thermal protection, EDL, and payload engineers behind it are scarce.
Read the post →A Russian satellite just parked next to a Western radar satellite. Watching orbit is now an engineering job.
Russia's Cosmos 2612 matched orbits with commercial SAR satellite ICEYE-X36 in what LeoLabs calls a deliberate rendezvous. Space domain awareness, GNC, and RPO engineering just moved up the priority list.
Read the post →Google just put AI chips in orbit. The hard problem is getting the heat out.
Project Suncatcher's Planet-built prototype reached orbit on Transporter-18 and is operating as expected. Scaling orbital compute is a thermal, power, radiation-effects, and laser-link engineering problem, and those engineers are already in demand.
Read the post →21 more military data satellites are on the pad. The hard part is the laser links between them.
SDA's Tranche 1 Transport Layer A mission puts 21 Northrop Grumman satellites on a Falcon 9. Proliferated LEO shifts the constraint to optical terminal, RF, Link-16, and interoperability engineers.
Read the post →Starship just went for orbit with a real payload. The bottleneck moves to the satellite factory.
Flight 14 carried 26 Starlink V3 satellites on Starship's first orbital attempt. When heavy launch gets cheap and frequent, the scarce resource becomes the power, RF, and test engineers who build the spacecraft.
Read the post →A $161M reactor contract just landed — and the engineers who can build it barely exist
The Air Force's space acquisition office awarded Antares $161M for space nuclear power, from ground demo through flight certification. Why the hiring pressure lands on power conversion, thermal, and radiation-tolerant electrical engineers.
Read the post →NASA just bought a new phone line to Mars — and the engineers who build it are already scarce
Blue Origin's ~$700M Mars Telecommunications Network award replaces relay hardware launched in the early 2000s. Why it is a deep-space RF, optical, and navigation engineering story — and where the hiring crunch lands.
Read the post →6,500 Earth-observation satellites by 2035 — and the talent bottleneck is in the payloads
Novaspace's new forecast: 6,500+ EO satellites and $155.9B in manufacturing revenue by 2035, driven by sovereign ISR and SAR-optical-RF constellations. Why the hiring crunch lands on payload, RF, and constellation-ops engineers.
Read the post →China just landed an orbital-class booster. The reusability race is now global — and so is the fight for launch talent.
LandSpace's Zhuque-3 stuck China's first land recovery of an orbital-class booster the same week Starlink passed 11,000 satellites. What a three-player reusability club means for propulsion, GNC, and structures hiring.
Read the post →The Pentagon just turned satellite disposal into a market — and it will strain the industry's rarest talent
DIU and SDA tapped Firefly, D-Orbit USA, and Katalyst Space for deorbit-as-a-service. What the satellite-servicing wave means for RPO, GNC, robotics, and propulsion hiring.
Read the post →AI is moving into orbit — and it's about to reshape space engineering hiring
Compute payloads, orbital data centers, and onboard autonomy are jumping from concept to launch manifest. What the orbital-AI wave means for satellite engineering talent.
Read the post →Welcome to the Fastwater Staffing blog
Why a staffing firm is writing about satellites: what we'll cover here, from space-industry talent trends to ITAR & CGP hiring, and how to get it in front of your team.
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