Award Winning Ways At MicroSat Systems

Receiving a prestigious award is always a boost for any company and cause for celebration. MicroSat Systems, Inc. [MSI] knows full well how such can be a joyful experience — Aviation Week has awarded the Small Company Breakthrough Award for their TacSat-2 satellite the company. With its successful launch on December 16, 2006, TacSat-2 became the inaugural MSI spacecraft bus to be launched, the first responsive space demonstrator operated by the U.S. military, and the initial demonstration of a deployable thin-film solar array in space. “The judges at Aviation Week cited the viability of TacSat-2, particularly in light of the current military theater needs” as mentioned in the September 24th issue of Aviation Week, Page 86.



Aviation Weeks directive for the award is to spot and laud excellence and innovation, with a special emphasis on small-tier and developmental/startup companies. Award submissions were based on some of the following product characteristics: The operational need for the product, customers requirements, the history & product overview, product strategy, risks, complexities, performance and schedule, current status of the product, and customer satisfaction, The award ceremony will be presented at the AW&ST’s A&D Program Conference in Phoenix on October 30, 2007.




The TacSat-2 program was the first Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) flight demonstration program under the Operationally Responsive Space initiative featuring 11 onboard experiments. The successful December 16, 2006 launch of TacSat-2 demonstrated MicroSat System’s ability to provide a high performance small satellite for a very competitive price on a major responsive space program. MicroSat designed, built, and environmentally qualified the satellite bus with a 59% payload mass fraction and delivered the basic bus structure to AFRL in 12 months and built the primary solar arrays and the experimental thin-film solar arrays—Littleton, Colorado