The space industry is weighing ambitious hiring against heritage
Space is hard, as the decades-old adage goes. For much of the industry's history, "rocket science" was as much a barrier to entry as a byword for difficulty.
But now a growing swell of young ventures is attracting millions of dollars to pioneer some of the most ambitious space markets - some with little or even no prior space experience.
Take Orbital, a Los Angeles-based startup founded by electric scooter entrepreneur Euwyn Poon earlier this year. The company recently raised $5 million for plans to deploy more than 100,000 orbital data centers.
Poon has no space experience, though he plans to assemble a team of experts from SpaceX and others who have built and flown spacecraft at scale.
Investors have also been making sizable bets on ventures well before they have deployed significant hardware in orbit. Two of the four private satellite operator ventures that achieved valuations of $1 billion or more so far this year have done so without deploying a single commercial satellite, according to the SpaceNews Unicorn Tracker.
But is buying in space heritage really that simple? Are there legacy capabilities and advantages that can't be transferred with personnel?
"Hiring from legacy companies is indeed a key way to acquire heritage indirectly," said Gabriel Deville, a manager at research firm Novaspace.
Deville pointed to how Blue Origin hired extensively out of United Launch Alliance and other legacy space companies to acquire knowledge, while former SpaceX engineers have seeded many others.
"Still, acquiring talent is only the first step of developing a company's own knowledge base, before the slow process of development and production leading to heritage and credibility," he said.
Heritage is widely regarded as key for most space markets, Analysys Mason principal analyst Dallas Kasaboski said, especially if hardware is involved and particularly for the high-stakes launch sector.
"If it doesn't fly, we won't buy," he quipped.
However, at odds with this approach is the amount of capital needed to develop rockets that are desperately needed to support growing space ambitions.
"On one hand, nobody will launch with you if your rocket isn't already proven reliable," Kasaboski said, but on the other, "launch supply is so short that launch players are getting money left, right and center to develop the rockets."
Combined with the pressure of SpaceX's near-monopoly on available launch capacity, this lack of capability has shifted investment criteria, translating into large funding rounds for ventures such as Stoke Space, MaiaSpace and PLD Space even before their first test flight.
Germany's Isar Aerospace even raised $312 million in June to expand production of its Spectrum small launch vehicle, a little over a year after the rocket's first and only flight to date malfunctioned.
It's a similar story across the space sector.
"New is a very strong trend for investment," Kasaboski said.
In 2024 and 2025, Analysys Mason research shows "a lot of investments were purely cited because they were new things," he said, such as pioneering new sensors or payloads.
"I would say that Earth observation funding these days is driven either by where they're doing something new or they're doing something climate-focused," he added, as tackling climate change becomes an increasingly important political topic.
Though it largely remains to be seen whether these innovative technologies will find customers, investment momentum continues to build regardless.
"In the last few years we've seen that you really don't need any experience at all to find investment," Kasaboski said. "Not saying it's easy, but there's just a lot of companies like these that are receiving huge funding rounds, and they didn't exist last year."
And these funding rounds are also coming with sky-high valuations that until recently were unheard of for young space startups.
Cowboy Space, for instance, recently achieved a valuation of around $2 billion, less than two years after being founded, to support the development of rockets with upper stages that would serve as data centers once in orbit.
While Cowboy CEO Baiju Bhatt's father worked as a scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, the entrepreneur behind financial services app Robinhood said he had no prior space experience before founding the venture.
Naturally, there are concerns about space potentially entering an investment hype bubble that could later burst, alongside a flood of capital flowing into the emerging artificial intelligence market.
But some of these early ventures have also gone on to secure lucrative contracts that would have traditionally been picked up by their larger, more established peers.
"Even beyond private capital investments, in several cases companies with limited heritage have even managed to convince even government / national security users," Deville said via email.
He pointed to in-orbit refueling startup Orbit Fab, space junk removal venture Astroscale and spacecraft logistics specialists Starfish Space and Impulse Space. Those companies have used their "agile, fast-moving value propositions and narratives" to win contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense.
For Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES, which helped pioneer the medium Earth orbit (MEO) broadband market after being founded in 1985 and is now reinventing itself to adapt to the evolving landscape, the rise of well-funded startups presents an opportunity.
"Sometimes it is frustrating, when you are generating [around] $1.5 billion worth of EBITDA and trying to generate certain things and see others being able to waste cash," SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh said, "but I think it's just a natural dynamic in an industry that has now incredible recognition and potential."
According to Al-Saleh, the trend is not so different from the AI, robotics or IT industries, where investors are making large bets on smaller companies with significant growth opportunities, versus incumbents that would struggle to show double or triple digit growth in the near future.
"It doesn't bother us at all to see companies like that with VC-backed money," he added.
"For us, the tricky part is finding these guys who really have not just cool ideas, but have clear experience in scaling them and being able to integrate them into our networks and our offerings, which helps us, of course, drive innovation."
Partnering with an established player can help add credibility for new technology and businesses, adding the kind of clarity that is just as important for anchor customers as investors.
"For us, the tricky part is finding these guys who really have not just cool ideas, but have clear experience in scaling them and being able to integrate them into our networks and our offerings, which helps us, of course, drive innovation."
In May 2025, SES signed an agreement to use an orbital transfer vehicle from Impulse Space for one of its geostationary satellites in 2027.
Founded in 2021 by CEO Tom Mueller, who had previously led propulsion development at SpaceX for many years, Impulse Space raised $300 million a month later in a funding round that sources told SpaceNews gave the company a valuation of at least $1 billion.
SES has also recently partnered with four-year-old satellite maker K2 Space, which is building an initial 28 satellites for the operator's next-generation MEO network, slated to be in operation by 2030.
K2 Space, founded in 2022 by former SpaceX engineer Neel Kunjur and his brother Karan, raised $250 million in December in a round valuing it at $3 billion.
SES has also recently partnered with small satellite operator Lynk Global, which is looking to build a constellation to take on SpaceX in the emerging market for connecting standard smartphones directly from space.
"The customers are much more comfortable with having an exciting, innovating startup partnering with somebody that they know that delivered in the past, that can secure the delivery of the services that the customer is looking for," Al-Saleh added. "That's very important."
The sheer scale of an established satellite player is still critical for international market access, Al Saleh said, alongside distribution sales channels and other infrastructure that can accelerate a startup's path to market.
Legacy operators already have extensive ground infrastructure in place to support space operations, along with the engineering expertise and experience coordinating satellites that could become even more valuable as orbits become increasingly congested.
"It's the combination of the two, the startup entrepreneurship [and] excitement about this new technology, plus the experience, scale and capability that makes it successful," Al-Saleh said.
"There are hundreds of startups [and] there's a lot of excitement in the beginning, but how many of them actually make it? A very small portion of them."
"And the ones that make it are the ones that clearly have great ideas, great innovation, incredible entrepreneurs, but are also finding partnerships that will enable them to bring their products to market."
There's also a political angle to consider as governments seek more strategic autonomy in space.
"Clearly, access to licenses to land signals and relationships with regulators to be able to file for things - and compete for incremental spectrum when it comes to market - is a huge advantage for an established player," he said, "versus a relatively unknown company."
If startups developing constellations from scratch are on one side of the heritage spectrum, SES and fellow European operator Eutelsat are on the other. Both have branched out from legacy geostationary orbit (GEO) businesses into non-geostationary orbit by acquiring companies already well on their way to commercial service.
Notably, both have also been hiring CEOs from outside the space sector in recent years.
Al-Saleh joined SES in 2024 from Deutsche Telekom, where he was CEO of its IT services provider T-Systems.
Jean-François Fallacher, a former CEO of telco Orange France, took the helm of Eutelsat in 2025. Before that, the French operator was led by Eva Berneke, who had joined in 2022 from Danish IT and software company KMD, part of Japanese technology group NEC Corporation.
At the time, these were notable appointments for what was once a relatively narrow and specialized satellite club.
After joining Eutelsat in 2009, chief communications and investor relations officer Joanna Darlington has seen firsthand the changes the nearly 50-year-old company has made in recent years.
"It percolates the whole company," she said, "even the way we sell now is different."
Where Eutelsat's sales team once focused mainly on raw capacity for video, connectivity or data, the company now focuses on integrated services in close collaboration with distribution partners.
Darlington echoed Al-Saleh's thoughts on the distribution and customer advantages legacy operators bring, pointing to Eutelsat's acquisition of OneWeb in 2023 as part of its pivot into low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband for growth.
"The main synergy for OneWeb was that we already had all of the distribution network there," she said, along with GEO customers Eutelsat could upsell LEO or multi-orbit services.
In addition to engineering and operational experience, Darlington highlighted the legal and financing teams necessary for dealing with the space environment.
"I think that definitely has been an advantage for us, particularly in the integration of OneWeb," she added.
But as nimble as the industry's stalwarts can be, large publicly listed space players such as Eutelsat and SES do not have the same flexibility as private, smaller firms.
While Eutelsat's OneWeb pivot was a major step for an operator that for years had been critical of the business case for LEO broadband, the French giant is still largely unable to leave its lane without strong justification.
Space is a very expensive business, Darlington noted, and companies like Eutelsat have strict return-on-investment requirements.
It's good business management "that we're not necessarily suddenly going to go down a rabbit hole of some completely different aspect of the space sector," she added.
There are, however, ways a legacy player can dip their toes into other markets.
Eutelsat, for instance, is exploring Earth observation among other hosted payload opportunities for OneWeb's next-generation constellation.
The company is also using the constellation to support adjacent services under the European Space Agency's Sunrise Partnership Project, including an effort to use OneWeb satellites to improve access to Earth observation data in connectivity-challenged regions.
Where once a dearth of qualified rocket scientists might have held the industry back, a virtuous circle over the last five years has pulled more experts into the expanding industry, in part thanks to SpaceX's runaway success.
"It's kind of been the fortune and the misfortune of our industry that we were the focus of Elon Musk," Darlington said, referring to how SpaceX's CEO has also forced legacy players to adapt and find ways to take on their deep-pocketed rival.
The industry's support ecosystem has also expanded to include telecommunications, IT and other sectors once considered outside the traditional space industry.
SpaceX's recent IPO could enrich another cohort of veterans to set up more space ventures and forge their own legacies, while the engineering talent the company develops could further lift the broader sector.
Or not. SpaceX plans to use its own proceeds from selling shares to greatly expand Musk's sprawling, vertically integrated empire, which will likely require even more talent to be sucked in.
"SpaceX may not be churning through the engineers that they once did because now they're working on so many things that they may become more of a black hole of hiring," Kasaboski said.
The company now also has even more firepower to acquire companies to quickly absorb engineers, technologies and other scarce capabilities.
A more aggressive expansion strategy from SpaceX risks squeezing an already constrained supply chain that challengers rely on for growth.
Meanwhile, SpaceX's dominant position sets a high bar for competitors as it has become an almost essential service, Kasaboski noted, particularly for U.S. government missions that would suffer major disruption without access to its rockets and spacecraft.
In the past, heritage, expertise and experience were key to avoiding many of the operational challenges and costs that can make space so challenging.
Those factors are still necessary, Kasaboski said, but with enough funding an aggressive team can help absorb failures and keep moving.
"SpaceX can afford to fail," he said, adding that maybe the industry's upstarts can also find ways to put Silicon Valley's "fail fast" mantra into practice for space to rapidly innovate and grow.
This "hype margin can eat away at the value proposition of heritage," he said.
But there are limits.
Beyond investment, when the time comes to contract vital, full-fledged capabilities, Deville said users still scrutinize the ability to deliver.
"Large manufacturing, launch and transportation contracts (especially government contracts) are still passed to actors with heritage, or at least to a pool of actors including some with heritage," he said.
"In fact, the trend we are seeing now, especially in the U.S., is more a hyper-concentration of the largest government markets by a single actor with extensive heritage, SpaceX, than a balanced distribution across actors."
That includes major defense communications, national security, International Space Station transportation and lunar landing contracts where SpaceX has become the central player for the United States.
While companies with little or no heritage have managed to raise billions of dollars since the late 2010s in the wake of SpaceX's first major successes, Deville said track record still matters, though its importance varies.
"It matters more to users procuring a capability than to private investors with large amounts of cash and a VC ‘move fast, fail fast' mentality," he said.
"Today still, the more capabilities are important, the more they are procured from companies with strong heritage or at least to a diversified pool of companies including some with heritage [and] others still emerging."
And then there are companies like SES that are blurring the line.
"We see ourselves as a combination of legacy, experienced player with startup mentality," Al-Saleh said.
That is very different from the company's approach a decade ago, when SES took over the O3b MEO constellation and folded it into a more traditional satellite operator model.
Today, Al-Saleh said, SES "would have enabled them to go build the technology and scale" it, rather than simply "speccing it and giving it to somebody else."
In other words, SES would now be more likely to preserve and accelerate O3b's own development inside the company, instead of folding it into the traditional satellite operator model of specifying requirements and outsourcing work to manufacturers.
As for "space is hard," a phrase used as early as 1992 in a speech from former NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin to encourage students not to fear failure, the influx of capital may be changing who gets to challenge the adage, but not the risks they must overcome.
It's an aphorism that echoes John F. Kennedy's historic 1962 speech about going to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
More than 60 years later, space remains hard. What's changing is how much money investors are willing to commit before companies show they can make it look easy.
An abridged version of this article first appeared in the July 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title "When space ambition outruns heritage."
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