[SatNews]  Astrium held the Astrium Awards ceremony in Paris on December 9th—among those attending the event were Jean-Jacques Dordain, the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), Jean-Yves le Gall, the CEO and Chairman of the French Space Agency (CNES), and Astrium CEO François Auque.
 
The Astrium Awards honored, across six categories, the teams and employees who contributed to customer satisfaction and to the operational success of the company in 2013. And, for the first time, the Astrium Awards jury was made up of Astrium’s customers and partners:
 

• The jury for The Great Product/Project category, chaired by ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain, rewarded the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) project. The ATV remains to this day the only fully automated transporter supplying the International Space Station. It has already performed four outstanding missions, with the next one scheduled for mid-2014. Its remarkable reliability and the outstanding regularity of its successes is the result of work carried out by the project teams.
• The jury for The Great Business Development category, chaired by Jean-Yves Le Gall, the CEO and Chairman of the French Space Agency (CNES), rewarded the COMCEPT project. Despite the challenge it posed, COMCEPT has put forward original technical and industrial organisation solutions that have greatly benefited its customer, the French Ministry of Defence.
• The jury for The Great Improver category, chaired by Laurent Collet-Billon, the Managing Director of the French armament procurement agency (DGA), rewarded the Supply of Waveguard project, which has brought about a 30-percent reduction in key supply cycle times and subsequent improvements in the lead times for implementing telecommunications programs.
• The jury for The Great Craftsman category, chaired by Elisa Robles Fraga, the Director General of the Spanish Centre for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI), rewarded Astrium’s propulsion testing team in the UK, which, during the course of 2013, has delivered six ready-to-launch satellites and nine propulsion systems, all on time and on budget.
• The jury for The Great Inventor category, chaired by Johann-Dietrich Wörner, the Chairman of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), rewarded Miguel Angel Plaza Baonza for his work on the deployment and separation of high-performance mechanisms. The jury was particularly impressed by the fact that these mechanisms generated very little in the way of release shocks, a major asset for the missions using them, such as Galileo.
• The jury for The Great Innovator category, chaired by David Parker, the Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA), rewarded Jason Gilmore for his work on efficient technologies in the use of aluminum, which have proved cheaper than composite technologies to the tune of several hundred millions of euros, underlining the fact that innovation can involve the pioneering use of tried and tested solutions. 

Astrium CEO François Auque said, “The Astrium Awards are our way of showcasing one of Astrium’s greatest strengths, namely the tremendous ability of Astrium’s 18,000 employees and their dedication to their customers. These men and women are driven by a desire for excellence, a quality in which the 36 people honoured at this ceremony have managed to surpass themselves.”