The Space Economy Workforce and STEM Occupations

Recent BEA statistics show the U.S. space economy employed over 373,000 private sector workers in 2023, spanning almost every industry sector in the economy. However, little is known about the occupations within these industries, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the current skillsets of the space workforce and future skills needed to support the growing space economy. In this paper, we combine multiple government statistics to show the occupational makeup of the private-sector space economy workforce between 2017 and 2022. The data show that over half (56 percent) of occupations in the space economy workforce in 2022 were considered science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs, more than double the rate of STEM occupations in the overall U.S. workforce. Software developers (a science and engineering occupation) represented the single largest occupation, followed by electrical, electronic, and electromechanical assemblers (a middle-skill STEM occupation) and sales representatives of services (a non-STEM occupation). These results provide important new insights into the composition of the space economy workforce, though more detailed and timely data on space-related employment and occupations would benefit further understanding of this growing area of the economy.