Astronomy Prints 🌌: Editor's Choice: What's happening with the federal space workforce

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Editor's Choice: What's happening with the federal space workforce

02/11/2026

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By Mike Gruss

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced last week a new directive aimed at what he described as a loss of technical competency in the agency and as a way to rely less on contractors.

"NASA has outright lost or outsourced many core competencies in engineering and operations that once enabled the agency to undertake the near-impossible in air and space," he said in a video posted to social media.

Questions about NASA's workforce have been a constant during the second Trump administration.

In the last year, at least 5,000 space workers left the U.S. government. That's through reductions in force, resignations and retirements. It marks one of the most significant changes in the space workforce in the last 50 years.

For the last several months, SpaceNews' Debra Werner has been interviewing some of those employees. Last week, we published eight of the conversations as Q&As.

A few of my favorite anecdotes:

From Mark Munsell, who was at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency:

"There was a Reduction in Force in 1997. I was working for a boss on a project on a Friday. I came back on Monday with the same boss on the same project making twice as much money because they outsourced me. While that was good for my family, it was bad for the agency and bad for the country. The government can be too short sighted with this zeal to outsource because you need people with those skills as leaders in the government."

From Shawn Phillips, who was at the Air Force Research Lab:

"On a Thursday night, I sent out a message on LinkedIn saying that I decided to go into consulting. Over the next few hours I counted 28 calls from people that wanted me to consult."

And this from Charity Weeden, who had been at NASA:

"Every day I walked by the worm [logo] in front of headquarters and said to myself, 'Kick ass today, Charity, because you don't know when this dream will end.'

It's worth making time to read the whole package.

SIGNIFICANT DIGIT

$54.5 million

The size of the contract from the U.S Space Force to Starfish Space to build and operate a spacecraft designed to support military satellites in geostationary Earth orbit.

An illustration of a SpaceX "BFR" spaceship, a precursor to Starship, at a notional future lunar base from a 2017 speech by Elon Musk Credit: SpaceX

A FOCUS ON THE MOON

A little more than a year after dismissing the moon as a "distraction," Elon Musk says SpaceX will focus on lunar settlement before sending humans to Mars.

In a social media post Feb. 8, Musk said SpaceX was deferring its long-held ambitions of establishing a permanent human presence on Mars, instead devoting resources to creating a "self-growing city" on the moon.

"For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20-plus years," he wrote.

Lunar ambitions have been top of mind for space companies. On Jan. 30, Blue Origin announced it would halt flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle for at least two years as it shifts its focus to human lunar exploration. Both moves come after President Donald Trump signed a Dec. 18 executive order that sets a goal of returning humans to the surface of the moon by 2028 and "establishing initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost" by 2030.

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