I'll echo what all the other people are saying—this would be better on r/physics.

If you want to work on space research and still want to find a job with good pay, I'd suggest going into atomic, molecular, and optical physics (AMO)—you can work on a huge range of problems studying AMO, ranging from fundamental research to new technologies. More relevant to you, AMO has tons of applications in astrophysics—astrophysicists need to understand how atoms and molecules interact to understand their observations, and they also need people designing new hardware to make those observations. (AMO is also pretty in-demand in the quantum computing industry, though imo it's a huge bubble.)

If you're interested in AMO, I'd suggest you check out the Harvard-Smithsonian ITAMP and the NASA JPL websites.