Shoal wins Innovator of the Year at the 2022 Australian Space Industry Awards

25 Mar 2022

Shoal has taken out the award for Innovator of the Year – Company at the Australian Space Industry Awards in Sydney. Shena Howell, Program Lead – Space Systems Engineering, accepted the award on behalf of the team. “This award goes to our Blue Water team. For a small to medium enterprise in Australia, we spend a lot of time in R&D, and this goes specifically to the Shoal Aerospace and Risk Capability (SHARC) tool which helped with the Hayabusa2 return and all of our launch safety analysis and support. This is such an amazing group to be up against, well done to everyone nominated tonight. Thank you to the sponsors and award winners. “The award was based on the team at Shoal analysing the re-entry of JAXA’s Hayabusa2. This re-entry to Earth required complex and significant quantities of simulations taking into account hypersonic speeds, planet rotation, physical phenomena like aerodynamic uncertainty and atmospheric and wind variation, and the change from ballistic capsule configuration to deploying a parachute, after ejecting its fore and aft heat shields. Furthermore, failures had to be considered at all possible stages.To overcome this, a new, bespoke analysis toolkit – Shoal Aerospace and Risk Capability (SHARC) was developed. SHARC gave us full control of the fidelity to which we could represent the vehicle physics. We leveraged R&D and using this, delivered the required result on time. Having undertaken risk policy review work in the past also helped greatly, as we were able to translate ’the letter’ of the law to create concrete requirements for our computational tools using the SHARC framework.Congratulations to the Shoal finalists who were also nominated in their individual categories:

Female Space Leader of the Year – Shena Howell
Engineer of the year – Tom Cregan
Rising Star of the Year – Dimitri Mitakidis

Pictured: Shena Howell accepting the Innovator of the Year Award on stage at The Star in Sydney.

These prestigious awards identify the top businesses and professionals in the space industry, recognising them for their exceptional achievements throughout the past year and contribution towards advancing space capabilities within Australia.

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