Hiring Booms At SpaceX And Blue Origin Making It Hard For NASA To Attract Talent

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SpaceX and Blue Origin LLC are competing to launch satellites and take humans to the moon. They are also paying big salaries to hire so many young and tireless engineers that old-line aerospace employers like Boeing Co. and NASA are finding it harder to fill positions.

Their private firms also often pay more than established space operations. SpaceX is currently listing starting aerospace engineer positions at $95,000 to $115,000 a year.

NASA, which follows the federal government's General Schedule pay scales, offers starting salaries along a range that starts at $54,557 for engineers with bachelor's degrees, $66,731 for master's degrees and $73,038 for doctorates at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Helping SpaceX or Blue Origin build towering rockets, orbiting labs or moon landers can also mean serving at the whims of mercurial executives. California has accused SpaceX of routinely underpaying women and minority workers. And jobs at the startups can mean laboring on projects that never see the light of day or sitting at a cubicle for 80 or 90 hours a week.

Nonetheless, graduates from elite colleges have been jumping at the chance to contribute to the ambitious plans of the startups, and each company is hiring rapidly. Blue Origin, with more than 10,000 workers, had more than 1,500 job postings in mid-March. SpaceX is estimated to have more than 11,000 workers and had over 1,100 openings.

This has intensified recruiting drives for aerospace majors at colleges like the Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan.

William Putaansuu, an aerospace engineering undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Blue Origin and SpaceX ⁘know people want to go work for them.⁘

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