Garage48 SpaceTech: Integrated Applications. already the second Garage48 hackathon focused on space technology, kickstarted the European Space Week events and brought our space events to a next level. The event which took place on the 3-5th November in Tartu brought together 122 software and hardware engineers, designers and space enthusiasts. 23 different nationalities were counted among the participants including people from as far as Australia, Iran, China and Brazil. On Friday, 21 ideas were pitched of which 13 gathered a team around them and were presented at the Sunday finals.

It is already the second time Garage48 is organising a space tech hackathon. “This year the quality of ideas has grown, the teams are more serious. The winning team consisted of Latvians, who are regular visitors of Garage48 hacks. They showed excellent skills in software and hardware development and it was an honour to announce them as winners,” commented the host of the event and one of the co-founders of Garage48 Priit Salumaa.

The overall winner of the event, iDoBalloon team, built an educational DIY High Altitude Balloon Kit that students can send to discover stratosphere. The runner-up prize went to TeamOnGrid, whose solution enables team tracking on MGRS map during military endurance competitions.

Pauls Irbins, the leader of the winning team, encouraged everyone to take part in similar events: “The whole process was a big challenge for our team because we haven’t been working on such big projects before. In the 48 hours we experienced a lot of positive emotions but also conflict inside the team and very little sleep. That is why mentors and the support from organisers is such an important element to reach your goal by the end of the event. We hope that we are an inspiration to other people to take part of hackathons and build their idea into reality!”

The event was organised under the auspices of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and was the kickstart event for European Space Week. The representative of the ministry Paul Liias was content with the outcomes of the event: “The teams and ideas were innovative and novel. Some of the ideas really surprised me that they were built at a space technology hackathon. Totally out of the box!”

The event was also extraordinary because among the organising partners we had two of the main European space focused organisations - the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European GNSS Agency (GSA). “This hackathon has showed - once again - that space unites. It unites people, countries, knowledge and intentions, and the result is always  bigger than the sum of its parts. I felt privileged to witness  and contribute to the collective creativity and intelligence that was palpable all throughout the event. This is our first Hackathon with Garage48, and we are already looking forward to the next one,” commented Cristina Comunian from GSA. The head organiser of the event Kai Isand marks: “It is a big thing for us that we had the opportunity to bring together two of the biggest space field players to one hackathon. The participants had access to Galileo and Copernicus data, both of the organisations brought a top notch mentor team and will continue to support the teams that continue after the hackathon - all of this added to the success of the event. I think from here the international space field will start having a bigger contribution from Estonia.”

The event had other great partners: ESTCube (taking care of the hardware teams with making sure all the materials and equipment needed is in place and more importantly being present with their expert team tackling any problems the teams had), Milrem, CGI Eesti and University of Tartu.