On August 14, the Defense Innovation Unit and the Space Development Agency announced contracts with three companies — Firefly Aerospace, D-Orbit USA, and Katalyst Space — to develop deorbit-as-a-service: commercial vehicles that can sweep decommissioned defense satellites out of orbit when their useful lives end. The awards cover preliminary design and risk-reduction work, with the door open to full on-orbit demonstrations for the approaches that mature.
It's the latest step in a deliberate build-up. SDA funded six feasibility studies on commercial disposal back in 2024, and Starfish Space later landed a first-of-its-kind $52.5 million contract to deorbit up to seven spacecraft. Each contractor brings a different vehicle to the problem — Firefly its Elytra maneuvering spacecraft, Katalyst its Link robotic capture vehicle, D-Orbit USA its space-logistics platform. And it wasn't even the only signal that week: the Space Force also tapped five satellite manufacturers for Space Data Network connectivity demonstrations, part of a steady drumbeat of proliferated-constellation awards.
The through-line is hard to miss. The Pentagon is concluding that a proliferated architecture — hundreds of satellites, refreshed on five-year cycles — only works if retirement is as industrialized as launch. Congested orbits are an operational risk, and dead satellites are debris waiting to happen. Disposal is no longer an afterthought in the ops plan; it's a procured service with its own industrial base.
Why servicing is the hardest engineering in the business
The agencies themselves spelled out what a viable deorbit service has to do: put a servicer into the right orbit, locate and approach a target autonomously, determine its attitude and motion, capture it without generating debris, and carry enough propulsion to finish the job — all at a commercially attractive price. Every clause of that sentence is a discipline where genuine experts number in the hundreds, not thousands:
- Rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) — trajectory design and safe-approach guidance around an uncooperative object is a specialty that, until recently, lived almost entirely inside a handful of government programs.
- GNC and autonomy — relative navigation from optical and lidar sensors, pose estimation of a tumbling target, and fault protection that can abort an approach on its own when comms lag makes ground-in-the-loop impossible.
- Space robotics and capture mechanisms — grappling hardware that was never designed to be grabbed, without shedding fragments. The line between a clean capture and a debris event is a mechanisms problem.
- Propulsion and mission design — servicers live and die on delta-V budgets; electric propulsion, refueling concepts, and multi-target tour design all come into play.
- Cleared and export-controlled talent — this is defense work on national-security spacecraft. ITAR applies, clearances help, and program offices expect both handled correctly from day one.
The talent collision ahead
Here's the market dynamic those awards set in motion: three funded competitors — plus the servicing, refueling, and inspection startups already flying — now need the same short list of RPO, GNC, robotics, and propulsion engineers at the same time, while the established primes building out proliferated constellations are hiring from the identical pool. When preliminary design reviews wrap and the strongest concepts move toward on-orbit demonstrations, the teams that staffed early will hold their schedules. The ones that waited will discover that servicing talent doesn't sit on the open market for even a week.
Launch got cheap because an industrial base formed around it. Disposal is next — and the constraint won't be funding or physics. It will be the few hundred engineers who have actually flown proximity operations.
For hiring managers the playbook is the one that worked in every previous space buildout: move decisively on strong 80% fits, use senior contractors to bridge the specialist gaps, and lock in the cleared, export-controlled talent before the demonstration phase turns the market white-hot.
Where Fastwater fits
Fastwater Staffing is the number one staffing firm for space and satellite engineering programs, and servicing-adjacent talent is squarely in our lane: senior contract engineers in GNC and mission analysis, RF and comms, FPGA and avionics, mechanisms and structures, propulsion, and flight software — including candidates eligible for ITAR-controlled and Canadian Controlled Goods Program work, which we handle as a matter of routine.
As deorbit-as-a-service and the wider servicing economy move from studies to flight hardware, we're already screening the profiles those programs will fight over. That's why space and defense programs treat us as the engineering staffing source they trust most when a seat absolutely has to be filled with someone who has done it before.
The Pentagon just made cleaning up orbit a business. The engineers who can do it are already being counted.