The IAF Excellence in Industry Award for 2023 will be awarded to:

Throughout the James Webb Space Telescope’s (Webb) development, NASA and Northrop Grumman leveraged strong relationships with the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), subcontractors, and ultimately with communities around the world to execute a near-flawless final integration and testing phase prior to launch. Thousands of engineers and hundreds of scientists worked to make Webb a reality, along with 300 universities, organizations, and companies from 29 U.S. states and 14 countries, including over 800 small businesses.

Webb’s successful mission has enabled astrophysicists to take the deepest, sharpest infrared image of a distant galaxy, probe previously unseen regions of space, and detect carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, and these accomplishments are only the beginning.

The deployment of Webb was executed on the journey to its final orbit (a million miles from Earth), included 344 single-point failures, and required hundreds of components to perform flawlessly. The global team orchestrated the process seamlessly.

As the world’s largest, most powerful, and technologically challenging space telescope, Webb is a major accomplishment in the field of astronautics. Webb features many cutting-edge innovations, and is a game changer for global astronomers, looking back in time over 13 billion years to the first stars and galaxies forming in the early universe.

The IAF Excellence in Industry Award - SMEs Category for 2023 will be awarded to:

Astroscale is the first private company with a vision for the safe and sustainable development of space for the benefit of future generations and is solely dedicated to on-orbit servicing across all orbits. The company is developing innovative and scalable solutions across the spectrum of on-orbit servicing, including life extension, in space situational awareness, end-of-life services, and active debris removal, to create sustainable space systems and mitigate the growing and hazardous buildup of debris in space.

On March 22, 2021, Astroscale successfully launched their ELSA-d mission. This was the world’s first commercial mission to prove the core technologies necessary for space debris removal in low-Earth orbit (LEO), an unprecedented demonstration for a commercially funded mission in LEO. The demonstration proved key technologies such as capture via magnetic arm and docking plate, tracking of an object from a great distance, rendezvous with an uncontrolled object, and handover from absolute navigation to relative navigation for a LEO servicing spacecraft.

In addition, a key aspect of the success of the ELSA-d mission is the various partnerships it has with ground station providers and space situation awareness (SSA) service providers. These partnerships are crucial for managing the most complex maneuvers and ensuring critical mission safety operations and transparency.

The technologies validated through the ELSA-d mission mark the initial steps toward Astroscale's vision of achieving routine on-orbit servicing by 2030.