On 24 January 2023, during the 15th European Space Conference in Brussels, the winners of the fourth edition of the #T-TeC - Telespazio Technology Contest, the Telespazio and Leonardo Open Innovation contest open to students and university researchers in STEM subjects from all over the world, were awarded.

The winners

For the 2022 edition, the #T-TeC turned into a real start-up incubator. The first prize - won by a team from the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and the Observatoire de Paris (France) - offered access to an acceleration pathway at Leonardo's Business Innovation Factory (BIF), in addition to EUR 10,000 in cash. 

The second prize was awarded to an international team composed of students from Imperial College (UK), the Max Planck Institute (Germany), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Stanford University (USA) and the University of Oxford (UK), which, in addition to EUR 6,000 in cash, will have the opportunity to start the project on a pre-incubation path by the I3P of the Politecnico di Torino, which will enable the team to prepare itself in the best possible way for a place in the European Space Agency's incubation path at the Business Incubator Centre in Turin (ESA BIC Turin).

The third prize, worth EUR 4,000, was awarded to a team from the Politecnico di Milano, with the SunCubes project, while  team from Politecnico di Torino received with "Constellation architecture in lunar orbit for energy wireless transmission on the Moon" the Test-it Award - one of the novelties of this edition - aimed at developing a proof of concept of the project presented. 

Two special mentions went to students from the Krakow University of Science and Technology (Poland), with the μPURA project, and to an international team from ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Istituto Europeo di Design (Italy) and two Argentinean universities, the Universidad Nacional de la Plata and Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, with "Low-cost infrastructure deployment services to support the space resource utilisation value chain".

The awards were presented by Leonardo's Space Activities Coordinator and Telespazio CEO, Luigi Pasquali, Leonardo's Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Franco Ongaro, and Telespazio's Head of Innovation and Technology Governance, Marco Brancati, as well as Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti!

  • 1st Place - SAFE EUR 10,000 + Acceleration pathway to develop the project through Leonardo's Business Innovation Factory (BIF)
  • 2nd Place - SPAICE EUR 6,000 + Pre-incubation pathway organised by I3P, the incubator of Politecnico di Torino
  • 3rd Prize - SUNCUBES EUR 4,000
  • Test-it Award - ORIS Proof of concept financed by Leonardo with the technical collaboration of Telespazio

News about #T-TeC