sorry, but space must pay more, because the system must be 100% bugfree, and cannot be updated easily. on the bottom of the sea or on roads you still get live-updates, or at least car callbacks.

you also have severe space and time restrictions, more than in a car or surgical robot.

no agile for sure. there's not much room for agility or changing requirements in space.

The highest pressure jobs are at the bottom of the sea

boom crack

Usually anything cool pays less: Movies, Music, Video Games etc and space is in that category for some. Also you don't work there unless you really want to.

My first job was at Industrial Light and Magic during the first star wars prequels and paid $11/hr, with OT after 8 hours, so about $32k/yr. If you didn't like it, others were lined up around the block.

I wouldn't do that now, but at the time it was like getting paid to attend a university that was waaaay more interesting than my actual university. The company was still very bohemian and you had access to the people that wrote the book on digital and practical effects.

There can be huge value, especially for junior engineers in having certain companies on your resume. ILM opened up every single door of every VFX or animation house. I'm sure spaceX would have similar benefits.

You just need to make sure the benefit is worth your time.

But you can get the same bugfree system from a process and 3 subengineers.

Plus you can expand the thiefdom management cake.. And that is real growth..

I don't think there's a way to communicate with vehicles at the bottom of the sea. Seawater isolates EM signals perfectly. It's actually much easier to do live updates of vehicles in space.

but it pays less

because people are ok with being underpaid in return for being able to say they work on space shuttles

we will all be fucked until we all learn to negotiate