established the awards in 2017 to acknowledge and rejoice the people, programs and institutions shaping a rapidly evolving global space economy. Chosen by journalists with invaluable input from previous winners of those awards, the 2023 class of SpaceNews Icons include a mixture of heavyweight champions, scrappy newcomers and long-serving stalwarts of an industry it has been a privilege to cover since our 1989 debut amid the dawn of the industrial space era.
STARTUP OF THE YEAR: Isar Aerospace
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Europe is within the midst of what officials there openly call a “launcher crisis.” A mix of development problems, launch failures and geopolitical complications have temporarily deprived Europe of the power to launch its own satellites. The Ariane 6, once planned to enter service in 2020, has been pushed back to 2024, after the retirement of the Ariane 5. The Vega C small launch vehicle has been grounded since a December 2022 launch failure and won’t return to service until late 2024. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last yr deprived Europe of access to the Soyuz rocket, which had backstopped each Ariane and Vega.
Amid the present problems, though, are signs of hope for the long run. Several startups across the continent are working on small launch vehicles, developed with only modest government support. Those vehicles, expected to start launches in 2024, will offer Europe each latest ways to get to orbit and latest solutions for its launcher crisis.
Certainly one of the businesses on the vanguard of that effort is Isar Aerospace. Named for the river that flows through its home city of Munich, the corporate is nearing the primary launch of its Spectrum rocket, designed to position up to at least one ton of payload into orbit. The corporate has been performing acceptance testing of engines for the rocket and, in November, inaugurated a launch pad for the rocket at Norway’s Andøya Spaceport.
More impressive, perhaps, has been its ability to lift money. In March, Isar announced it raised $165 million in a Series C round from a bunch of European investors to assist complete development and scale up production of Spectrum. The funding was one in every of the most important rounds raised by an area company in 2023 worldwide, and brings the whole raised by Isar to this point to $330 million — essentially the most by a European space startup.
Remarkably, Isar raised the cash whilst other launch firms faced serious financial problems. Just per week after Isar closed its round, Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy, its assets later liquidated. Astra, which raised a whole lot of tens of millions going public through a SPAC merger in 2021, is now running low on money and has delayed work on its latest launch vehicle.
Isar has its own challenges as well. When it raised the Series C round, it expected to conduct its first Spectrum launch by the tip of the yr, but that has since slipped to sometime in 2024. It is usually facing European competition from firms like
HyImpulse, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Skyrora, all planning first launches in the approaching yr.
The progress Isar Aerospace and others have made has helped reshape the European launch landscape. On the European Space Summit in November, ESA member states agreed to a
package of monetary support for Ariane 6 and Vega C, including a guaranteed variety of institutional launches of every vehicle. Nonetheless, additionally they agreed for the primary time to open up some government missions to competition from other launch firms. That was only possible due to the progress, each technical and financial, that Isar Aerospace and others have made in providing latest ways for Europe to achieve space and helping get it out of its current launcher crisis.
DEAL OF THE YEAR: Eutelsat-OneWeb Merger
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Eutelsat and OneWeb’s merger has created the one global operator with wholly owned satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and the geostationary arc, promising hybrid capabilities they consider will give them the sting on fierce competition within the broadband market.
The all-share deal combining French operator Eutelsat’s 36 satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) with U.K.-based OneWeb’s LEO constellation of greater than 600 spacecraft also got here at a critical juncture for each firms.
Eutelsat was in search of ways to turbocharge a pivot into high-growth connectivity services as its legacy satellite TV business dwindled. At the identical time, OneWeb sought a lift to tackle the growing dominance of SpaceX’s Starlink LEO network.
OneWeb had suffered multiple setbacks and only recently deployed enough satellites to enable global services before the tip of this yr. Launches using Russian Soyuz rockets were first placed on hold after the pandemic pushed the corporate into chapter 11 in 2020. The British government and an Indian conglomerate rescued OneWeb from Chapter 11, just for Soyuz to be caught up in sanctions against Russia following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 got here to the rescue this time, together with GSLV Mark 3 rockets from India that enabled OneWeb to resume launches seven months later.
But within the meantime, OneWeb was forced to observe from the sidelines as Starlink made gains in vital enterprise markets, including aviation and maritime customers that many satellite operators are banking on for growth — including Eutelsat.
Eutelsat’s established distribution channels world wide should help speed up the commercialization of OneWeb satellites now in LEO, where broadband could be supplied with lower latency compared with orbits much
farther from Earth.
Low latency is essential for a lot of applications, from gaming to cloud-based networking. GEO satellites flying 35 times higher than LEO satellites, though, still have a bonus on the subject of delivering larger volumes of capability to high-traffic areas, vital for relieving congested networks at hotspots resembling bustling airports.
The combined Eutelsat OneWeb group believes multi-orbit networks working in concert might be vital for meeting future connectivity needs as demand for bandwidth soars.
Other operators are also positioning their businesses for a multi-orbit future amid a shift toward hybrid networks
pioneered a decade ago by SES, Eutelsat’s European rival with satellites in GEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO).
Telesat, a Canadian GEO operator, has plans for a LEO constellation called Lightspeed that SpaceX is as a result of begin launching in 2026. Intelsat is supplementing its GEO network with services from OneWeb satellites because it plots a MEO constellation in 2027, and geostationary giant Viasat is considering non-geostationary options after acquiring Inmarsat in a $6.2 billion deal.
Key to Eutelsat OneWeb’s success on this evolving landscape is the form of a second-generation LEO network the group plans to deploy in 2027 to make the most of its GEO backbone.
Eutelsat has estimated OneWeb Gen 2 would cost $4 billion. That’s a heavy investment, but not one which deterred the greater than 87% of Eutelsat shareholders voting at its general meeting in September in favor of the OneWeb merger.
Now, Eutelsat OneWeb just needs to indicate a completely owned and integrated GEO-LEO constellation can deliver the strategic advantage its constituents have been in search of.
COMMERCIAL SPACE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE YEAR: SpaceX launch tempo
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Most launch firms announce their next missions days, weeks, and even months upfront. Against this, in late November, SpaceX publicly announced its next launch just three hours before a Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying a payload of Starlink satellites.
That limited advance notice reflects the rapid pace of launch activity at the corporate: There’s no use to announce launches weeks upfront when SpaceX is launching two to 3 times per week. SpaceX announced plans early in 2023 to conduct 100 launches within the yr, and as of the tip of November, it had launched 83 Falcon 9 rockets, 4 Falcon Heavy rockets and two test flights of its Starship vehicle. Against this, SpaceX launched 31 rockets, all Falcon 9
vehicles, in 2021.
The increased cadence is linked to SpaceX’s mastery of reusability. Nearly all of the Falcon 9 missions this yr involved reused boosters which have flown, in some cases, as much as 18 times each. The corporate also commonly reuses payload fairings, meaning a typical launch might only require a brand new upper stage. Improvements in ground infrastructure allow the corporate to conduct launches from the identical pad just 4 days apart.
That prime flight rate is crucial for each SpaceX and the general space industry. Greater than half of SpaceX’s launches in 2023 have carried Starlink satellites as the corporate works to construct out the constellation to serve a growing number of shoppers, in addition to race Federal Communications Commission license milestones.
SpaceX’s rapid launch cadence comes as much of the remainder of the launch industry struggled to get off the launch pad in 2023. A mix of development delays, launch failures, and geopolitics have sharply reduced the provision of vehicles not named Falcon. Customers unwilling to attend several years have little selection but to go to SpaceX, where they’ve found loads of near-term launch opportunities.
That’s resulted in contracts that may have been considered unthinkable just a number of years ago. Telesat announced in September it could launch its Lightspeed constellation, a competitor to Starlink, on Falcon 9 despite earlier having signed launch contracts with Blue Origin and Relativity Space. The European Space Agency launched its Euclid space telescope on a Falcon 9 in July, with two more missions to launch on that rocket in 2024. The European Commission said in November it was finalizing a contract for 2 Falcon 9 launches of Galileo navigation satellites in 2024.
SpaceX plans to proceed increasing its launch rate. At a Senate hearing in October, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice chairman for construct and flight reliability, said the corporate was planning to perform 12 launches a month in 2024, or 144 for the total yr.
Tom Ochinero, SpaceX’s vice chairman of business sales, suggested in March that the corporate could go to as many as 200 Falcon launches a yr. “Now we have the hardware, now we have the infrastructure, we will scale the staffing,” he said. “There isn’t any reason why we will’t keep going.”
CIVIL SPACE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE YEAR: OSIRIS-REx sample return
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Sample return is on the apex of NASA’s planetary science exploration strategy by way of each its advantages and complexity. Bringing material back from one other world allows it to be studied with instruments much more sophisticated than what could be sent on a spacecraft. Samples can be preserved for evaluation by future generations of scientists with more advanced equipment, as is the case today with lunar material returned by the Apollo missions. Nonetheless, designing a spacecraft to perform such a mission could be extremely difficult and expensive, as shown by NASA’s current struggles with the Mars Sample Return program.
One NASA mission that demonstrated the advantages of sample return are well worth the costs is OSIRIS-REx. On Sept. 24, a capsule landed within the Utah desert with about 250 grams of fabric from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu inside. The capsule’s contents were whisked to the identical curation facility on the Johnson Space Center that holds the Apollo samples, where scientists immediately began analyzing them.
To say those scientists were excited by their first have a look at the fabric from Bennu could be an understatement. “We picked the precise asteroid and, not only that, we brought back the precise sample,” said Daniel Glavin, one scientist involved within the mission, at a briefing a pair weeks after the samples arrived. “These things is an astrobiologist’s dream.”
NASA chosen the $1.16 billion mission — whose name is a convoluted acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer — in 2011 as a part of its Latest Frontiers line of planetary science missions. Scientists hoped that the samples would help them understand the formation of the solar system and the constructing blocks of life on Earth.
That initial evaluation of the samples, showing them wealthy in carbon and hydrated minerals, appears to verify those hopes. “We’re already thrilled with the outcomes,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx on the University of Arizona.
OSIRIS-REx was not without its difficulties. When the spacecraft arrived at Bennu in 2018, scientists discovered the asteroid’s surface was strewn with rocks, making it tougher to search out a spot to soundly collect samples in a “touch-and-go” maneuver. When the spacecraft carried out that maneuver in October 2020, it found the surface was very porous — like a ball pit, scientists later said — and the spacecraft’s sample arm plunged deeper into the surface than planned before pulling away, its sample head overflowing with material. The capsule was so stuffed with material that, back on Earth, scientists have struggled to get it open: a literal embarrassment of riches.
The major OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, after releasing the sample canister in September, flew by Earth on a brand new prolonged mission called OSIRIS-APEX that may take it to a different near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, in 2029. Long after that prolonged mission is over, scientists will likely still be examining the fabric OSIRIS-REx bought back from Bennu, proof that the worth of sample return is well worth the expense of getting those materials back to Earth.
SPACE STEWARDSHIP: T.S. Kelso
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If the skies were cloudy when NASA’s Skylab space station omitted Kansas City shortly before reentering Earth’s atmosphere in July 1979, the world might never have gained one in every of its most dedicated space safety and sustainability experts.
Watching Skylab pass overhead inspired T.S. Kelso to place his recently acquired desktop computer to make use of tracking artificial satellites. Forty-four years later, Kelso continues to maintain tabs on satellites and orbital debris through CelesTrak, a free web-based service he established in 1985 to share orbital locations and analytical tools.
Kelso’s accomplishments would fill many articles. But listed below are a number of the highlights.
He earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering operations research from the University of Texas, Austin, and accomplished 31 years of active-duty military service, retiring as a colonel. During a 17-year profession at AGI and Comspoc, Kelso provided expertise to the corporate’s research arm, the Center for Space Standards and Innovation.
While leading the U.S. Air Force Space Command’s Space Evaluation Center within the early 2000s, Kelso became conscious about the U.S. military’s overwhelming reliance on industrial communications satellites and the indisputable fact that the Defense Department was not screening them for potential collisions in geostationary orbit.
After retiring from the Air Force, he developed online tools to discover conjunctions and helped establish the Space Data Association, a global organization that allows satellite operators to share ephemeris data and maneuver plans securely, in addition to the Space Data Center, which assesses collision risks and issues warnings.
During his lengthy profession, Kelso taught extensively. On the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, he served as an assistant professor of space operations and associate dean of the Graduate School of Engineering.
While within the Air Force, Kelso led the Department of Defense’s evaluation of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident, which provided evidence that helped explain why Columbia broke apart on reentry, killing the seven astronauts onboard.
Earlier in his profession, Kelso established training for Air Force personnel assigned to the Consolidated Space Operations Center near Colorado Springs when it took over military satellite and Space Shuttle programs previously managed by government contractors on the Satellite Test Center in Sunnyvale, California. He also supervised the team of Air Force and contractor personnel managing operations of nine Block 1 Global Positioning System satellites.
An Air Force Academy graduate, Kelso earned a master’s in space operations from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a master’s in business administration focused on quantitative methods from the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Along with being a fellow of the American Astronautical Society and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Kelso was the inaugural recipient (and stays the namesake) for the Space Data Association’s T.S. Kelso Award for Space Safety.
USUNG HERO: Utah State University’s Small Satellite Conference
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Hundreds of individuals travel to Logan, Utah, every August for the annual Small Satellite Conference at Utah State University.
Unlike other conferences where people continuously dash off to go to colleagues or customers, SmallSat participants are inclined to linger, remaining on campus throughout the day for technical sessions and side meetings, meals, coffee, and snacks.
“We do a number of things here to advertise interaction,” said Pat Patterson, Utah State Space Dynamics Laboratory advanced concepts director and SmallSat conference chair.
SmallSat dates back to 1987, when a number of dozen university research professors were in search of reasonably priced ways to enhance classroom instruction for aerospace engineering students. On the time, that meant pooling resources to construct miniature satellites.
“You bring the sensor, I’ll bring the ability system, and possibly we will afford to construct it,” Patterson said. “The entire point was getting these folks to collaborate.”
Nearly 38 years later, SmallSat stays true to its academic roots and spirit of collaboration. Researchers showcase their work through poster sessions. And the SmallSat Student Competition awards college scholarships for progressive satellite concepts, research and missions.
While the SmallSat Conference ballooned to three,700 participating in 2023, attendees proceed to share buffet lunches at long tables under a tent on the grassy quad.
“A number of times where you’ll have a colonel sitting next to professor and across from a student and any person from Lockheed Martin,” said Patterson, who attended the primary SmallSat as a Utah State student in 1987, joined the SmallSat Committee in 1997 and has been overseeing the conference since 2000.
SmallSat also promotes interaction through jam-packed exhibit halls where attendees line up for Aggie ice cream, a day treat produced on campus with milk from Utah State’s Caine Dairy.
Unlike other conferences where prime contractors can go for expansive booths with meeting rooms and seating areas, SmallSat offers only single or double booths.
“That’s intentional because we would like your entire community to be here,” Patterson said. “We wish firms with three people to have just as much opportunity to showcase their wares on the ground as the large boys.”
Despite spearheading the event, which is predicted to bring 4,000 people to Logan in 2024, Patterson deflects credit for its success to SmallSat committee members, staff and volunteers, who evaluate a whole lot of single-page proposals for technical sessions, short talks called Swifties and poster sessions.
For SmallSat attendees, who wonder how long the expanding event can remain in Logan given the dearth of hotel rooms, Patterson has a message.
“If it moved to a giant city, it could lose the character and the associated fee would skyrocket,” Patterson said. “We’ve looked into an even bigger venue several times. Every thing just goes berserk on the subject of cost.”
MILITARY SPACE ORGANIZATION OF THE YEAR: Space Systems Command’s Industrial Space Office (COMSO)
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As innovation in space technology rapidly accelerates globally, the U.S. Space Force finds itself at an inflection point. Mission success relies not only on constructing traditional military hardware but on leveraging advancements from the burgeoning industrial space industry.
Efforts to bring cutting-edge industrial space capabilities into the national security realm are being spearheaded by the Space Systems Command’s Industrial Space Office (COMSO).
COMSO is being recognized for its work facilitating the adoption of recent industrial space technologies across the Space Force. At a time when the space domain is growing more contested — and is becoming the newest front for U.S.-China strategic competition — COMSO leaders understand the importance of aligning entrepreneurial vigor with national defense priorities.
“As a way to achieve success, we actually need to begin migrating away from pondering that now we have to construct all the things in-house,” says U.S. Space Force Col. Richard Kniseley, senior materiel leader at Space Systems Command and head of COMSO.
“We’d like to shift to a mindset to begin getting sufficient capability on the market fast to the warfighter,” Kniseley insists.
The Space Systems Command established COMSO in April 2023 as a “one-stop shop,” combining a patchwork of business endeavors right into a more streamlined organization. “That permits us to grasp and tap into the robust industrial marketplace,” says Kniseley. He explains that COMSO “openly engages industry to unravel government challenges and opportunities.”
The Space Force must be “consistently evaluating where we will go along with industrial industry, and to commonly meet with firms to grasp their capabilities going forward,” Kniseley adds, noting that the mantra at Space Systems Command is to “construct what we must and buy what we will.”
Among the industrial activities under COMSO existed before the office was created, resembling the Industrial Satellite Communications Office, the SpaceWERX organization and the Space Enterprise Consortium. SpaceWERX awards small business innovation research contracts and serves as a strategic financing hub to assist startups attract investors. The SpEC consortium manages prototyping projects where established defense contractors team up with nontraditional firms.
Other elements of COMSO are newer initiatives, resembling an online portal called “front door,” aimed toward helping startups find contacts and enroll for meetings. COMSO also runs an area domain awareness marketplace that facilitates interaction and transactions between space data producers and consumers.
Its newest project is the industrial space reserve — an idea just like the industrial reserve air fleet, where airlines comply with provide the federal government with airlift services during emergencies. The main points of a industrial space reserve are still being worked out, and the Pentagon has expressed support for this system.
For all its early momentum, COMSO faces headwinds. Old procurement habits within the Pentagon die hard. And the preponderance of military space dollars still flows towards expensive, custom-built systems, not the industrial alternatives the office seeks to advertise. Not everyone within the industrial space industry is convinced that COMSO can transform entrenched military procurement practices, as there are pockets of skeptics who instinctively distrust the reliability and security of business space services not purpose-built to strict military specifications.
Nonetheless, COMSO is slowly exposing more Space Force members to cutting-edge industrial capabilities while educating private sector firms on specialized government needs.
An upstart within the military space-industrial complex, COMSO is postured to develop into a force for change within the defense procurement bureaucracy, step-by-step, contract by contract.
All 2023 HONOREES
The winners of the 2023 Icon Awards got here from a powerful list of finalists. These firms, missions, organizations and individuals have achieved major achievements within the last yr and, in lots of cases, over a few years. Below are temporary summaries of those other honorees within the award categories.
Startups of the 12 months
IMPULSE SPACE Led by none aside from SpaceX founding rocket designer Tom Mueller, Impulse Space is making waves within the industry by raising a powerful $75 million since last yr. What sets them apart? Impulse Space is on a mission to construct an in-space transportation company, positioning itself to take full advantage of Starship’s market-transforming rideshare capabilities. Their innovation has the potential to reshape the space transportation landscape..
KEPLER COMMUNICATIONS Hailing from Canada, Kepler Communications has attracted widespread attention with its $92 million Series C funding round this yr. This investment is fueling their expansion from low data rate IoT connectivity into optical data relay, a hot market driven by the U.S. Space Development Agency’s keen interest in laser communications. Kepler Communications is playing a pivotal role in shaping the long run of proliferated LEO communications and missile-tracking constellations.
THE EXPLORATION COMPANY Established in 2021, The Exploration Company has achieved a rare milestone by raising $44 million this yr, a record Series A for a European space startup. While this sum could be overshadowed by larger Series A funding rounds in the US, it marks a major accomplishment for the European enterprise capital market. The Exploration Company is concentrated on resupplying the burgeoning array of business space stations in development. The enterprise plans to launch its first reentry demonstrator next yr, likely on a Falcon 9.
Deals of the 12 months
VIASAT’s INMARSAT ACQUISITION Viasat’s expansion beyond the North and South American broadband markets it has served from GEO for a long time got a turbo boost from its acquisition of maritime-heavy Inmarsat and its fleet of 15 GEO satellites. Scale has its benefits in a consolidating market. The combined Viasat-Inmarsat, with 60% more revenue than Viasat alone, is healthier positioned to soak up the lack of ViaSat-3 Americas to a crippling deployment failure.
TELESAT’s LIGHTSPEED PARTNER PIVOT Telesat finally has funds for a LEO broadband network after pivoting from Thales Alenia Space to smaller but equally capable satellites from MDA. The Canadian operator booked SpaceX for 14 launches between mid-2026 and mid-2027 to totally deploy all 198 satellites Lightspeed needs to offer global coverage. While Telesat had hoped to begin expanding out of GEO years earlier, the corporate expects the delays might be a blessing in disguise for a constellation now set to be $2 billion cheaper with MDA.
L3 HARRIS’s AEROJET ROCKETDYNE ACQUISITION The completion of L3Harris’ $4.7 billion deal this summer to accumulate Aerojet Rocketdyne capped a period of uncertainty for the storied rocket engine manufacturer. Lockheed Martin in 2020 sought to purchase it for $4.4 billion. That acquisition was blocked by the Federal Trade Commission. The mixture strengthens L3Harris’ position in propulsion systems and the space market through expanded capabilities in technology for defense, civil and industrial applications. For Aerojet, being a part of L3Harris provides greater financial scale and access to capital that may support and speed up Aerojet’s R&D and product development efforts.
Industrial Space Achievements
INTELSAT AND SES MEET C-BAND DEADLINES Intelsat and SES are due a combined $7 billion windfall for returning publicly owned C-band to the FCC, on top of the $2 billion already received for helping make the spectrum available for U.S. telecom networks. The funding helps the businesses as they navigate a shifting satellite communications market that may increasingly rely upon non-geostationary satellite constellations. For Intelsat, that features considering using its C-band windfall to develop a medium Earth orbit constellation.
VIRGIN GALACTIC’s FIRST COMMERCIAL SPACESHIPTWO FLIGHTS After years of development delays, including a fatal accident in a 2014 test flight, Virgin Galactic began industrial flights in June, and continued to fly about once a month into November. This permits the corporate to finally serve customers who, in some cases, bought tickets greater than 15 years ago while working on a brand new generation of vehicles that promise more frequent and inexpensive suborbital flights.
Civil Space Achievements
CHANDRAYAAN-3 LUNAR LANDING India joined a small club of countries to have successfully landed on the moon. To date this century, nobody besides China — and now India — has accomplished a lunar landing, although plenty have tried (excluding, notably, the US). Underscoring the issue of this feat, Chandrayaan-3’s Aug. 23 landing near the moon’s south pole followed on the heels of failed attempts by Japanese industrial enterprise ispace on April 25 and Russia on Aug. 19.
TROPICS Greater than a decade went into the event of the 12-channel passive microwave radiometer sufficiently small to suit right into a 3U cubesat form factor. The mission overcame the obstacle of losing the primary two on an Astra rocket failure in 2022, with the rest launching on two Rocket Lab Electrons in May and commissioned in time for the beginning of the 2023 hurricane season.
NASA’s PSYCHE LAUNCHES NASA’s Psyche mission to the metallic main-belt asteroid of the identical name is back on course after software testing issues forced the mission to miss its original launch window in August 2022. Those problems prompted changes on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, correcting institutional issues that would have imperiled other missions run by the lab.
ESA’s JUPITER ICY MOONS EXPLORER (JUICE) LAUNCHES The ESA-funded, Airbus-built JUICE mission launched in April on an eight-year voyage to Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, considered three of Jupiter’s most tantalizing moons due to the opportunity of liquid oceans hidden beneath their icy surfaces.
Unsung Heroes
SPACE ISAC The Space ISAC was established in 2019 by aerospace, information technology and space firms to enhance cybersecurity. The nonprofit facilitates collaboration amongst firms and government agencies in identifying and responding to physical and cyber threats to spacecraft and terrestrial infrastructure. On the Space ISAC Operational Watch Center in Colorado Springs, analysts monitor space-related data to detect anomalies.
JEFFREY MANBER, NANORACKS Manber has been a pioneer in industrial space activities since his work with Russian space firms within the Nineteen Nineties as they navigated the transition from Soviet-era control. He later founded Nanoracks, which became one in every of the primary firms to make industrial use of the ISS, from launching cubesats to developing the Bishop airlock. The corporate is now on the forefront of efforts to develop industrial space stations to succeed the ISS. Manber received NASA’s 2023 Distinguished Public Service Medal.
MARCIA SMITH, SPACEPOLICYONLINE.COM With greater than 4 a long time of experience in space policy, Smith is an indispensable resource of clear and concise news, information and evaluation about U.S. civil, industrial and military space programs. Smith, a founding member and past president of Women in Aerospace, spent 31 years working on the Congressional Research Service and three on the National Academies’ Space Studies and Aeronautics and Space Engineering Boards. A fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a fellow of the American Astronautical Society, Smith is the founder and editor of SpacePolicyOnline and editor of the quarterly journal, Space Policy.
Space Stewardship
MORIBA JAH An astrodynamicist with a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, Jah is well-known for promoting space environmentalism in each industry and academia. As a professor on the University of Texas at Austin, he and colleagues developed tools to merge datasets of space objects from academia, industry and government. The resulting catalogs plus visualization tools can be found through free online platforms, ASTRIAGraph and Wayfinder. Jah can be co-founder and chief scientist of Privateer Space, an organization working on space traffic management technologies. Jah received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” in 2022.
CONFERS The Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS) was established with the support of DARPA to create an industry forum for discussing standards and best practices for the emerging satellite servicing field. Within the last yr, CONFERS has develop into a company independent of DARPA because it continues its work to further technology, policy and communications issues about satellite servicing.practices for the emerging satellite servicing field. Within the last yr, CONFERS has develop into a company independent of DARPA because it continues its work to further technology, policy and communications issues about satellite servicing.