What these people have in common is that they all went to space this year without the assistance of government space agencies. In the end, SpaceNews editors, reporters and trusted advisers agreed on nine individuals, organizations and trends deserving recognition.Ī Dutch teenager.

In such a remarkable year for commercial, civil and military space, picking winners wasn’t easy. We have also seen record numbers of space startups making their way to Wall Street via mergers with blank check companies, or SPACs, attracting billions of dollars from investors undaunted by a tenacious global pandemic.Īnd we continue to see record numbers of satellites launching to orbit, the upshot of an entrenched smallsat revolution driving even the most hidebound institutions to rewrite their playbooks.Īlongside all of this, we are seeing growing concern about space sustainability driven by not just those record numbers of satellites but also slow progress on space traffic management and a Russian ASAT test that created thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit.

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