ESA awards excellent suppliers

On 20 November, at the ESA stand at Space Tech Expo Europe 2025 trade fair in Bremen, Germany, ESA presented three space companies with this year’s prestigious awards for excellence and innovation.

OHB (Germany), a leading European aerospace company received the Excellence Award as prime contractor to ESA for its excellent work for ESA’s Plato mission. 

HULD (Finland), now part of Gofore Group, is a software engineering company specialised in safety-critical software and complex data processing. It received the Excellence Award as sub-contractor to ESA based particularly on its technical work and proactiveness in the frame of the Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 missions.

Excellence awards are awarded to those companies making a significant beneficial impact on the project’s objectives or having significant value from a technical and financial perspective. These nominations are based on feedback from the members of ESA projects working directly with the suppliers.

Luxtelligence (Switzerland) received ESA’s Innovation Award based on its high level of innovation in up to five projects developed in the domain of photonics within the frame of Discovery and NAVISP Element 1. The company specialises in manufacturing thin-film lithium niobate and lithium tantalate for optoelectronics. 

This year’s Innovation award is based on nominations from the team working within ESA’s NAVISP Element 1, and its Discovery element which funds research, studies and early technology development activities in all areas of space technology and research. 

The ability of suppliers to deliver a quality product or service on time and at the right cost is paramount to the success of Europe’s activities in the space domain. By gathering key information about its suppliers and helping them to take action to improve, ESA can mitigate or even eliminate risks that could impact the performance of its projects and programmes.

This year’s awards correspond to evaluations carried out in 2024 and consolidated in the first half of 2025. ESA teams evaluated 33 projects, leading to a total of 241 evaluations on 119 suppliers distributed in 23 countries.

ESA identifies key elements or areas where companies can improve their performance and provides structured feedback via Supplier Performance Evaluations to support improvements. This collaborative effort fosters a win-win situation; suppliers become better at meeting the needs of ESA programmes while improving their long-term industrial capabilities.

Subcontractors, particularly small companies involved in this evaluation process become more attractive to ESA’s prime contractors which are more inclined to include them in their teams. As a result, they have the potential to take on higher responsibility in future projects.

Christine Klein, Head of the Industrial Policy and Auditing department at ESA commented: “This is the second year of the Supplier Performance Evaluation Excellence and Innovation Awards. This time we celebrate the success of OHB in Germany, Huld in Finland, and Luxtelligence in Switzerland; and we look forward to seeing additional excellent ESA suppliers being nominated for this recognition in the years to come.”