Quick housekeeping:
If this landed in your Promotions or Spam folder, drag it into your main inbox. Replying works too.
AD: I run The OuterSpark on Beehiiv platform. If you've been sitting on the idea of starting your own newsletter, you can set one up here. Every sign up helps me keep this going, but only do it when you feel ready.
Last week I wrote about the UK Space Power Conference and the amount of talk about keeping track of what's happening in orbit.
Four stories this week made me realise why that conversation has got louder. We're shifting from treating space as somewhere you send a mission to treating it as somewhere things happen continuously. Permanent jobs, constant tracking, repeat production runs. That's a different thing, and it needs different plumbing.
Fig. Me at the UK Space Power Conference 2026.
Space became a career rather than a posting
On 1 October, more than 600 US Army soldiers moved into a brand new Space Operations Branch, chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants.
The number isn't the story. Permanence is.
Fig. US Army Space Operations Branch insignia.
Until now the Army borrowed people from other trades, trained them in space, used them for a few years, then sent them back or reposted them elsewhere. All that expertise walked out the door on a cycle. Now there's a proper career path, so someone can spend twenty years getting genuinely good at it.
That's a signal worth reading if you're thinking about this sector. Institutions only build permanent career structures when they expect the work to still be there in a decade. The UK did something similar a fortnight ago with its first Space Effects Squadron. A lot of roles are appearing in a field almost nobody studied for.
UK company just raised the biggest early funding in Europe
A London company called Foundational came out of stealth this week with £8.2m, which it believes is the biggest space pre-seed round Europe has seen.
It fires lasers at satellites and times how long the light takes to bounce back, which gives a position far more precise than radar manages. Their own line is that it's like watching a car in Edinburgh roll forward by the width of a pencil, from London.
The technique has been around since the 1960s. The business is automating it and putting ten to twenty ground stations around the world, with service starting in 2027.
Fig. Retroreflectors to track space objects.
Here's why that's needed. Operators mostly don't know exactly where their satellites are, so they draw a generous safety bubble around each one and treat a shoebox as though it were a bus. That was fine when orbit was empty. With tens of thousands of satellites planned, those bubbles overlap constantly and you end up with collision alerts nobody can act on, because the uncertainty is bigger than the gap.
You cannot run a busy place without knowing where everything is. That's the whole pitch.
Varda raised $251m to make drugs in orbit faster
Varda grows pharmaceutical crystals in weightlessness. Without gravity tugging on them as they form, crystals come out more evenly, which can make a drug purer and more effective. The company has flown six missions and brought five capsules home.
The new money values it at $1.6bn and takes total funding to around $600m. What it's buying is cadence. More flights, more often.
That's the part that interests me more than the valuation. Six missions in a few years is experimentation. The ambition here is a production line that happens to be in orbit, where going up and coming back is routine enough to plan a supply chain around.
Fig. Varda’s capsule reenters Earth after producing space-grade pharmaceuticals.
And the working area is getting bigger with data centers
Starcloud, the orbital data centre company I wrote about last month, is sending an AI processing payload to lunar orbit aboard a Firefly spacecraft, no earlier than 2028. It will process images from the spacecraft's cameras around the Moon and send the results back. The orbiter is expected to stay up there at least five years.
Small payload, clear direction. They put an AI chip in Earth orbit last year. Now they want one working at the Moon.
Final thoughts
Everything above is infrastructure for staying in or beyond Earth’s orbit.
Careers instead of secondments. Tracking instead of estimates. Production cadence instead of demonstrations. Compute that sits somewhere and works for five years.
It's worth knowing because it changes what skills matter. The glamorous version of this industry is designing and launching things. The version that's actually hiring is operating them: flight operations, scheduling, collision avoidance, ground stations, data pipelines, maintenance. Less exciting on a poster, far more of the jobs, and much easier to get into without an aerospace degree.
If you've been trying to get into space and bouncing off engineering roles, look at operations instead. That's where the growth is!
Thanks for reading this week’s The OuterSpark newsletter. If you enjoyed the content consider subscribing and sharing it with others.
Till next time!
Ricky
