Sad news this week :(

Hello everyone,

A slightly different one this week. The job market is a bit quieter, which gives us a moment to look at the bigger picture.

We've got two pieces of news that perfectly capture the tough realities and the huge ambitions of the space industry right now.

Let's get straight to it.

Remember you can apply to the Career Spotlight series here. Why wait?

🚀 This week’s jobs on findaspacejob.com

Here are some of the most interesting roles that have been added to the site this week:

• Sales Manager in Space Products @ Thales (Switzerland)

  👉 A serious commercial role at a major player. You'll be selling loads of space products, a great opportunity for someone with a strong business and technical mindset.

• Electronics Engineer @ Revolv Space (Italy)

  👉 A hands-on hardware role at a startup focused on satellite mechanisms. If you want to be in the lab building and testing real flight hardware, this is for you.

• Systems and Applications Engineer @ ESA (Germany)

  👉 A role at ESA's ESOC in Darmstadt. You'll be there between the satellite systems and the applications that use their data, not bad.

• PhD-student Fire Emissions from Space @ WUR (Netherlands)

  👉 An interesting and important research topic. You'll be using satellite data to study the impact of fires on a global scale. Extra points if you knew this uni existed

• Lead Payload Engineer @ ESA (Netherlands)

  👉 A nice role at ESTEC. You'll be the technical lead for the development of complex payloads for future ESA missions.

• EO Future Missions Optical Engineer @ ESA (Netherlands)

  👉 This is about designing the eyes of the next generation of Earth Observation satellites. Also very very good. And, yep, also in ESTEC.

• Master Thesis: Thesis in SmallSat Core Avionics Products @ Airbus (Germany)

  👉 Now this one is for you 😉 a GREAT way to get into Airbus. Nice thesis project focused on onboard software and more… 6 months!

• Galileo Satellite Navigation Payload Signal Processing Engineer (d/m/w) @ Airbus (Germany)

  👉 This is a proper engineering role. You'll be working on the very heart of the Galileo system.

There are plenty of other jobs in the job board so be sure to check it out. Or else you might miss out 🤷‍♂️

Don’t forget that applying fast is important. It’s better to be the first applying than the 124th application…

🛰️ What’s happening in the industry

• A tough one for Europe: DARK shuts down.

DARK, the French space security startup, announced the end of operations yesterday. Their bet was bold: an air‑launched rocket called Interceptor to deploy up to 300 kg to LEO and intercept debris or hostile assets. Founded in 2021, raised over $11M, partnered with several companies, first launch planned for 2026 and still, it wasn’t enough.

Orbital launch is brutally hard: it demands deep capital, tech maturity and flight cadence (to keep the business alive). Europe’s funding cycles and procurement speed don’t help. Big respect to the team for the vision and the transparency. You can read their announcement below

• And Starship doesn’t slow down…

On the other end of the spectrum, SpaceX is targeting next week for the next Starship flight, with the current window around next tuesday past midnight (in Europe). Whether it finally launches or gets scrubbed for some days, the cadence is clear: more flights, more iteration, more data. This flight is very similar to the previous one and no tower catch is planned. But still, a fully reusable heavy lift launcher seems closer as time goes by…

In case you missed last flight highlights ☝️

That’s it for the week.

Until next Thursday!

P.S. Remember: the Career Spotlight is still on so if you want to be part of it: you can do so here!

P.S.S. If your company is hiring and is looking to promote its openings to the Find a Space Job audience, just reach out directly.

As usual: connect on LinkedIn and follow the Find a Space Job for updates between issues.

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📣 Hiring in aerospace?
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