Pros
Exciting projects; a young and generally friendly environment; a considerable amount of state/regional funding.
Cons
I had a very disrespectful and frustrating experience in this company: I moved to Belgium coming from a different country, specifically to join Aerospacelab, without any financial support or relocation package, to work on an interesting project which started by late 2022 (by the time I and practically the entire team for this project arrived). On the on-boarding day, the project manager told the team that we would have about 6 to 8 months for the first phase of the project, that we were expected to find solutions to develop the basic components for the project to work, and that by January 2023 we would discuss how to close the 1st phase of the project and where we would go from there. I worked on a specific problem for a little less than three and an half months, in my opinion I was doing a good job, never received any specific remark from the project manager during this time, kept communicating the advancements of my side of the project in regular team meetings and occasionally outside this meetings, without the project manager ever asking any further questions, providing any specific feedback, or any remark to make me aware that he could possibly be unsatisfied with my work or my feedback on its advances. By the end of the year, after less than 3.5 months on the job, the feedback arrived just before Christmas break in the form of a contract termination - I was then told that I was being fired because "for someone with my seniority, I was expected to work faster and communicate better the advancements of my side of the project". Of course, everyone had the feeling that I was not told the true, but I would say it is worth mentioning that the project manager for the specific project I joined is not an experienced professional, this is his first engineering job after a career change (and I believe he didn't have any team management tasks in his previous career, or if he did those tasks would surely not be comparable), and I could notice that he didn't had a solid technical background, but rather a superficial general understanding of the many different components required for the project to work (which would probably be enough, if he had peoples management experience or if he had worked with experienced engineering managers before). After leaving the company, In casual chats with several old colleagues, I became aware that several people in other teams consider that there might be a general lack of project management skills in the company. They also told me that there had been other stories of nonsense firing before, and that apparently in some occasions there were general announcements of "contract resignation due to the employee own decision" which turned out to be dishonest. All that being said, if you are a Belgium young graduate hungry for professional experience in the space market (which is indeed quite limited in Belgium), and you don't really need to relocate to join this company, go for it, the environment is young, friendly and vibrant, most people show a lot of energy and the desire to make the company move forward, and there are considerable Belgium/Walloon investments on the company; on the other hand, I would strongly advise against coming from abroad and relocating specifically for a job at this company - relocating/moving in to a different country is not a light decision to make, and if I had any idea that such an unheard firing story could be considered normal or acceptable at Aerospacelab, I certainly would not have made such a move.