Space industry hiring: October 2026

Window: 2026-10-05 → 2026-10-31. Companies with fewer than 5 active roles excluded.

Coverage change (2026-10-25): 3 employers joined the tracker (+51 postings: GHGSat, NorthStar Earth & Space, ClearSpace). Totals moving on this date reflect what we track, not market hiring. Month-over-month comparisons spanning this date are affected accordingly.

Coverage change (2026-10-26): Slingshot Aerospace joined the tracker (+11 postings). Totals moving on this date reflect what we track, not market hiring. Month-over-month comparisons spanning this date are affected accordingly.

The SpaceNexus Monthly Hiring Index is built from our jobs tracker, which syncs live postings daily from 90 employer sources: applicant-tracking-system boards (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others) at space companies and roles employers post on SpaceNexus directly. At defense primes and large contractors only space-segment roles count: a role counts when its title names space work (a space discipline, program, customer or space business unit). The employer list and each one's rule are on the jobs board. A posting counts as active when it is live on the employer's own board at our most recent sync; postings that disappear from a board are marked inactive, and duplicates across boards are scrubbed during ingestion.

Per-company counts come from daily snapshots taken since August 13, 2026. “Active postings” is the last site-wide snapshot on or before the month's final day; “fastest movers” compares each company's first and last snapshot within the month. When the way an employer's roles are counted changed during the month (for example, narrowed to space roles), its movers reading starts on the day of the change, so the removed roles never show as a hiring drop. “New postings” counts roles whose posted date falls inside the calendar month (UTC). Companies without a linked profile appear under their board's name as-is.

Same-employer change and the index level. The headline total moves when we start or stop tracking an employer, so each edition also compares month-end postings at employers tracked on the same basis at both month ends, the way retailers report same-store sales. An employer is left out of a month's comparison when its first snapshot came after the prior month end, or when its coverage rule changed during the month; an employer tracked at the prior month end with no job postings at this one counts as zero. Chaining those monthly changes gives the index level (2026-08 = 100), which coverage changes cannot move. This edition compares 40 employers; 21 new to the tracker are left out; left out for a rule change: Anduril, Apex, Array Labs, Capella Space, GITAI, HawkEye 360, Hubble Network, ICEYE, K2 Space, Leonardo, Loft Orbital, Lunar Outpost, Northwood Space, Outpost Space, Rocket Lab, Slingshot Aerospace, SpaceX, Spire Global, True Anomaly, Ursa Major, Vast, Voyager Technologies.

Two totals, and why. Every figure on this page describes October 2026 except the remote-share tile and the location table, which are computed over postings active today (2026-11-01) and are labelled “live” where they appear. We record no history of a posting's remote flag or location, so those two cannot be reconstructed for a past month, and we would rather say so than publish a month-end number we did not measure. The open-jobs chart plots the same site-wide snapshot series this page's headline is taken from, so the two agree by construction.

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