Board Thread:Galaxy on Fire Questions and Answers/@comment-119.96.8.20-20130529015422/@comment-7404610-20130529145855

Once you have all of the base game medals (even at Bronze level), instead of you paying your wingmen, they pay you. The dialog box doesn't ask "hire backup for ___$ ?", but "take the fans with you..."

One gotcha is that you can't accept wingmen if you don't already have the amount of money they're offering to pay you. I classify this as a bug in the game logic, but it's easy enough to sell something at the Hangar, accept the wingmen, then buy back whatever you just sold before you leave the station, so it probably won't ever be fixed.