April 11, 2018

2018 #ActInSpace® competition - Entries open

Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May, CNES, ESA and ESA BIC Sud France will be organizing ActInSpace®, the top international competition devoted to space applications. 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. [sinon, 140 new applicants are being taken in each year.]

Note the weekend of 25–26 May in your diaries today. Try your luck, discover all the possible applications of space technologies, invent tomorrow’s innovations or simply come along and enjoy the event.

Learn more at www.actinspace.org

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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

cp051-2018_-_actinspace_va.pdf (pdf - 349.59 KB)

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