All eyes were on the Artemis II astronauts yesterday as they made history looping around the far side of the moon and traveling further into space than any humans ever.
But as the crew—three Americans, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—heads back to Earth, there’s no financial windfall waiting for them. No performance bonus, overtime, or hazard pay, either.
Instead, the astronauts return to their government salary that tops out around $152,000 for U.S. crew members, with Canadian pay structured on a similar sliding scale.
For a mission that pushed the boundaries of human exploration, the compensation is strikingly ordinary—closer to a mid-career desk job, or even skilled trade jobs like electricians and HVAC technicians, than a once-in-a-generation journey around the moon. But like other federal employees traveling for work, the astronauts’ transportation, lodging, and meals are provided, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Fortune last year. They also receive a small daily stipend—about $5—for incidentals.
It’s a tradeoff thousands are willing to take: NASA’s class of 2025, announced last September, selected just 10 candidates from more than 8,000 applicants—an acceptance rate of roughly 0.125%, dwarfing even the most selective universities like Harvard or Stanford.
The future of work belongs in space, according to Elon Musk and Sam Altman
While only four astronauts made it into space with this month’s multibillion-dollar launch, some of the world’s most influential business leaders are betting that space could soon become a new frontier for work.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said his company hopes to begin testing hardware as early as 2027 that would place data centers in orbit, using satellites to handle growing computing demands.
“There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers,” Pichai told Fox News in December.
Elon Musk, too, hopes to solve AI’s power problems by building out data centers in space. But as the CEO of SpaceX, he has even bolder plans. In February, he said his company has shifted focus toward building a self-sustaining city on the moon within the next decade, a timeline he suggested is more achievable than establishing a colony on Mars.
“The mission of SpaceX remains the same: Extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars,” he wrote on X.
Even those less directly involved in space exploration see a shift coming. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted that rapid advances could push work for Gen Alpha beyond Earth’s orbit.
“In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job,” Altman said in an interview with video journalist Cleo Abram last August.
Still, the path to a space-based workforce remains uncertain. NASA is targeting next year to launch Artemis III—a test of lunar landers—followed by Artemis IV in 2028, which aims to return astronauts to the moon’s surface. The average launch delay for major NASA projects is 12 months, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
For now, the clearest path into the industry remains on Earth: Aerospace engineers earn about $135,000 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—with the field expected to grow by 6% over the next decade.
