In every engineering field, there are the contract jobs, and there are the steady jobs.
The steady jobs may be routine, possibly dull work that can only be done by someone with an engineering background. Examples may include working at a utility, government, or in a large manufacturing facility. On the other hand, there may be contract work that may be utterly fascinating and cool --as long as you're OK with keeping an extensive savings for those months when you'll be unemployed between jobs.
Aerospace design work can be a boom/bust sort of a thing. The booms can last for a decade or more. However, the busts are just as bad. Following the Apollo lunar missions, many engineers (not just aerospace) found themselves out of a job. Nobody needed their experiences, so they found themselves back at the bottom of the experience ladder. There were many who were so soured by the whole experience that they left the field of engineering entirely.
I personally observed another such bust while attending a college 20 years ago. The cold war had ended, and many who had scholarships from their defense contract employers found themselves unemployed and without funding to complete their degree.
Understand that this situation applies to every field of engineering, not just Aerospace. Though in the scheme of engineering work, Aerospace happens to have one of the bigger boom/bust cycles.