As the Archangel team works remotely through this long winter lockdown, we thought we’d bring a bit of joy by looking back at some team highlights over the past year.
Last February, Dan managed some international travel before the world shut down with a trip to Singapore with the UK Space Agency, representing the company as one of 30 Space Leaders to explore new collaboration opportunities! 🚀
Meanwhile our COO, Trang, returned from visiting family in Vietnam and asked us to order some masks and hand sanitiser for the office. We called her crazy…
Also in February, we welcomed Jay as our Mechanical Systems Engineer. As well as being a highly skilled engineer, Jay also lectures in Robotics, Aerodynamics, mathematics, propulsion... (the list goes on!) and is a published author - check out his top 100 selling engineering data book here!
In March we celebrated the wonderful women of Archangel Lightworks for International Women’s Day. Read more about the women of Archangel and their journey here. We managed to get a team photoshoot in on campus just in time…
And then… lockdown hit, the zoom calls started, and the emergency toilet roll rations were handed out at the office.
In June, our team won the grand prize in the 2020 Aerospace Innovation & Tech Forum a from Florida Venture Forum and Space Florida! Our CEO and founder, Dan Sola, said “I’m thrilled and humbled on behalf of the team to be selected from such a strong field of ground-breaking companies, especially so soon after the recent successful SpaceX launch from Florida. Archangel Lightworks have been working on US expansion plans for our laser communication products and services. This award, contacts and associated prestige will support us in building strong connections in Florida, and Space Florida are already proving to be excellent partners.” Read more about the win here.
Also in June, the team passed the CDR (Critical Design Review) stage of the HALO project with the European Space Agency. This means there is one stage left, build and assembly, for the laser terminals before they get ready to launch!
Here is a photo of Liam, our Electronics Engineer, doing some high speed data transfer testing in the lab that led to this milestone being reached! (Definitely not a staged photo at the marketing team's request).
Another major success for the team was our collaboration with Lockheed Martin.
The collaboration has examined several cases for deployment of Archangel Lightworks' technology for secure, undetectable communications at 10-100x the data rate of current solutions.
Summer also saw us have even more awards to celebrate!
Our founder, Dan Sola, won Start-Up Entrepreneur of the Year for the South East at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards! Read more about the win here.
We were also honoured to have been awarded Regional Winner for the South-East in Barclays’ Start-up Entrepreneur Awards 2020 and were Highly Commended in the National Final!
Archangel Lightworks has also made the shortlist (top 3!) for the British Engineering Excellence Awards. Fingers crossed for the National Final in March!
With a second lockdown for England announced on Halloween itself, we enjoyed yet another Zoom social with a spooky Halloween quiz and best costume competition. Safe to say some took the competition more seriously than others… (I mean it really was all to play for with a £20 Archangel branded Amazon gift card at stake).
In November, Stephanie joined our team as an ex-Ballerina turned Operations Manager extraordinaire!
Whilst we were growing our talented team, we wanted to ensure we were nurturing our people too. Since the first lockdown we had been looking for ways to keep our people socially connected when we can’t be together in person. After some early experiments, we decided to get the everyone in the team early Christmas presents of the Virtual Reality headsets! We opted for the Oculus Quest 2 model in the end – find out more about why we chose to gift the team headsets here.
We closed off the year with a super fun Christmas social. We had a mind-reading guest, music and comedy performances from our very own, and of course a party in virtual reality with our new headsets! We want to thank all our Archangel team for making it a great year of memories for us despite the challenging circumstances, we got through it together. #ArchangelLife
We've kicked off this year with an exciting new project! We are working with Airbus, Satellite Applications Catapult, University of Strathclyde and a range of cutting edge SMEs on an Innovate UK project: Viable Satellite Free-Space Optical Quantum Key Distribution Technologies (ViSatQT). The objective of the project is to prepare new modular flexible system architectures, technology landscape surveys and technology development roadmaps for lower cost, longer range, free space optical quantum communications – enabling strong, secure encryption for institutional and commercial customers in a post-quantum world. Read more about what the project entails here.
This month we were finalists at the SpaceCom Entrepreneur Summit and pitched live at the Grand Finale & Awards Ceremony!
We've got more exciting announcements coming very soon, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and sign up to our newsletter to be the first to hear!