Will Gen Z’s future of work include space travel? Tech leaders foresee space jobs and travel becoming a reality within a decade

• With entry-level positions vanishing for Generation Z, the key to securing a career resilient to AI might be found beyond our planet. Tech magnates Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are all optimistic that regular space travel is imminent—and university graduates might be Mars-bound within ten years.

(SeaPRwire) –   To some extent, youth are bearing the brunt of the AI transformation, with no indication of this trend abating. Research from Stanford University published last year revealed AI is exerting a “significant and disproportionate impact” on U.S. entry-level employees, sparking new worries about the upcoming generation’s start in the workforce.

Yet for those concerned about the evolving nature of employment, the next generation of workers might have to set their sights higher—literally towards the cosmos. This is because the very technology displacing conventional roles could also speed up the emergence of novel sectors, ranging from space tourism to colonizing other planets.

This is a prospect that billionaires like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are not only championing but also driving through their ventures: The most stable and high-paying careers of the future may exist off-world.

Sam Altman: The class of 2035 will be exploring the solar system

While recognized as the CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), Sam Altman is also among the increasing number of wealthy individuals enthusiastic about off-Earth living. He has stated that young people ten years from now could abandon terrestrial career paths for opportunities across the solar system.

“In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still attend college, might very well depart on a spaceship mission to explore the solar system in a brand-new, thrilling, highly-compensated, and fascinating role,” Altman informed video journalist Cleo Abram in 2025.

Such positions would not only allow Generation Alpha graduates to command enormous salaries but also have them “feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this really boring, old work and everything is just better.”

Although his forecasts are ambitious, the swift progress of AI is accelerating innovation and will aid in tackling major societal issues, which, he suggests, includes supporting life in space.

Elon Musk: Humans on Mars as soon as 2028

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and the world’s wealthiest individual, has been a uniquely powerful force in advocating for space advancement this century. He is the co-founder and CEO of SpaceX, a company that collaborates closely with NASA to further space exploration.

SpaceX has experienced notable delays, such as one in August 2025 for a Mars test rocket. Nonetheless, Musk anticipates uncrewed Mars rocket launches starting in 2026, with an initial human flight by 2028.

“I’d like to die on Mars, just not on impact,” Musk remarked in 2013.

Jeff Bezos: Space will be bigger than packages

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage as an online bookstore concept. Across thirty years, he expanded it into an e-commerce and data services giant worth over $2.8 trillion, boosting his personal fortune beyond $250 billion.

However, he projects that his aerospace firm, Blue Origin, will ultimately become an even greater enterprise.

“I believe it will be the finest business I’ve ever been part of, but it will require time,” he stated at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in 2024.

At 62, this suggests he expects space travel to become commonplace during his lifetime. Blue Origin’s goal centers on “a future where millions of people will live and work in space with a single-minded purpose: to restore and sustain Earth.”

The company is currently best known for its space tourism efforts. In 2025, a Blue Origin rocket carried Bezos’s wife, Lauren Sanchez, along with musician Katy Perry and journalist Gayle King to the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere.

An earlier version of this article was first published on .com on September 1, 2025.

More on the future of work:

• Sam Altman voices what many are thinking, acknowledging that some firms engage in ‘AI washing’ by attributing unrelated job cuts to the technology
• Look beyond Big Tech: Small businesses are set to employ close to 1 million graduates in 2026—and some of the most in-demand positions are delightfully AI-resistant
• Blackstone COO Jon Gray forecasts a ‘massive surge’ in blue-collar jobs—his data center firm alone is creating 30,000 new positions