The Awards Ceremony of Europe’s first innovation competition dedicated to space exploration on 16 November brought new business ideas and personalities on stage. The Overall Prize goes to SustainSpace – using an iterative process to rapidly improve plant populations in the space environment. Congratulations!
Besides winning the Overall Prize, SustainSpace also took home the Astrosat & Huntsville Prize of the Space Exploration Masters 2017. The Overall Winner SustainSpace uses an iterative process for rapidly evolving and improving populations of plants in the space environment. Current mission windows, frequencies and configurations limit the ability to grow and evaluate multiple generations of plants in space. The company plans to use the relatively frequent flights of the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Dream Chaser and its controlled landing to grow several successive generations of plants in a space environment and produce a rapid evolutionary and selection process.
5 more business cases and Challenge winners were also recognised during the Space Exploration Masters Awards Ceremony on 16 November 2017 by high-ranking industry and institutional representatives: The initiator, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Ministry of the Economy of Luxembourg with its SpaceResources.lu initiative, the Scottish company Stevenson Astrosat Ltd., Huntsville Madison County Chamber, USA, Airbus and Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.
NewSpace Europe – Europe’s first conference solely dedicated to new space and positioning Luxembourg as a European hub for space resources utilisation – presented the perfect setting for the Awards Ceremony of the very first Space Exploration Masters edition. One common objective was to continuously strengthen collaboration between traditional and new space actors.
