2018 ActInSpace competition

Midway between a hackathon and a start-up weekend, ActInSpace® will be held concurrently in some 40 countries and 70 cities on all five continents. Open to entrants from all horizons, the competition aims to develop entrepreneurship and forge ties between space stakeholders and citizens by setting challenges for teams to solve based on patents, software, data or space infrastructures. ActInSpace® was initiated by CNES in May 2014.

After the first event held in France in 2014 and the second extended to Europe in 2016, this year’s ActInSpace® is going global. Looking to consolidate the space sector’s dynamic image and show how space technologies are serving applications in all areas of our daily lives, ActInSpace® 2018 will be present on all five continents.

Aimed at students but open to entrants from all fields and levels, ActInSpace® pits teams of two to five against each other, giving them just 24 hours to devise an innovative and realistic project for a start-up on the basis of challenges set by CNES, ESA, Airbus and other partners of the event.

This year, competing teams will be able to demonstrate their prowess in a number of new areas such as NewSpace, humanitarian response and space exploration.

The teams will be assisted over the weekend by engineering and business coaches on hand to help them present the best project possible to the judging panel.

Each city and country will select the most promising team for the international final in Toulouse on Wednesday 27 June at the Toulouse Space Show 2018. If a country has several cities among the winners, it will select its best team to go forward to the final.

Airbus is once again the gold sponsor and event partner this year, sending experts to the competition, setting a number of challenges and providing two prizes. ActInSpace®’s growing reputation has attracted many new partners, among them Air Zero G, CLS, GSA, EBAN, Invivo, Qwant, FabSpace, Invest In Toulouse and Toulouse Business School. Some of them will also be offering prizes or setting challenges for the teams to solve.

The first prize will be a parabolic flight aboard the Airbus Zero-g aircraft used for microgravity experiments and training, giving the winning team the unique chance to experience weightlessness. This prize is sponsored by Air Zero G and ESA.

To turn the great ideas and ActInSpace projects into new European companies, ESA and its Technology Transfer and Business Incubation Office encourage the participants to join one of ESA´s Business Incubation Centres throughout Europe. More than 550 new start-ups have been fostered at the 18 centres, which are taking in 140 new applicants each year.

Note the weekend of 25–26 May in your diaries today !

Learn more at www.actinspace.org

About ESA Technology Transfer and Business Incubation Centre Initiative

ESA´s Technology Transfer and Business Incubation initiative promotes the transfer of technologies and related intellectual properties (patents) from ESA`s R&D and the Agency´s space programmes, as well as the use of satellite date, to develop new solutions and systems for citizens on Earth.

Started in 2004, today ESA has a network of technology brokers in 15 countries and 18 ESA Business Incubation Centres in 15 countries throughout Europe. The centres have fostered over 600 new companies supported so far, and is taking in 160 new start-ups yearly.

Learn more at www.esa.int/ttp

About ESA Business Incubation Centre (BIC) Sud France

Set up at the Paris Air Show in 2013, the ESA BIC Sud France is ESA´s first such centre in France. There are 17 others throughout Europe. The centre is coordinated by the Aerospace Valley competitiveness cluster in conjunction with CNES and the SAFE cluster. It comprises six incubators in the Nouvelle Aquitaine, Occitanie and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regions: Technopole Bordeaux Technowest, ESTIA Entreprendre, Théogone, the Midi-Pyrenees and PACA-Est incubators and the Montpellier BIC.

Since its inception, ESA BIC Sud France has incubated 55 start-ups, all having a connection to space, either through technology spin-off, satellite data analytics or applications (Earth observation, GNSS, etc.) or a product designed for the NewSpace market.

Learn more at www.esa-bic.fr

Contacts

ESA BIC Sud France
 Sylvie Lagarrigue / Tel: +33 (0)6 79 68 14 05 / lagarrigue@aerospace-valley.com
Aurélie Baker / Tel: +33 (0)5 61 14 58 02 / baker@aerospace-valley.com

CNES
Pascale Bresson Press Officer / Tel: +33 (0)1 44 76 75 39 / pascale.bresson@cnes.fr
Raphaël Sart Press Officer / Tel: +33 (0)1 44 76 74 51 / raphael.sart@cnes.fr