Axient Team Members Awarded RHG - Exceptional Achievement for Engineering

Several Axient team members were recently part of NASA’s Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU) Software Development Team presented the Robert H. Goddard (RHG) – Exceptional Achievement for Engineering Award from NASA. This award is presented to a team “for exceptional engineering achievement…in advancing NASA’s mission to enable safe, responsive, and reliable, low-cost access to space.”

Brian Hall, who nominated the team, said, “The NAFTU team’s world-class technical leadership in software engineering, software assurance, and range safety engineering, combined with project management excellence, successfully achieved this very challenging goal of creating a non-human rated Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) and providing it the commercial launch industry. This game-changing technology will reduce launch infrastructure requirements and launch costs by approximately 30%, increase launch cadence, and enable more responsive commercial, DoD, and NASA launches at Wallops. The NAFTU team’s pursuit of excellence, combined with closely collaborating with experts to certify the software, enabled the team to successfully develop this highly reliable safety system technology. For these reasons, the NAFTU Software Development Team is deserving of the RHG Group Achievement award.”

Axient is a proud contractor at NASA Wallops, where we deliver engineering, safety, mission assurance, and operations expertise across Wallops missions, including guided launch vehicles, unguided/sounding rockets, high altitude balloons, unmanned aerial systems, autonomous flight termination systems, and more.

Congratulations to Axient’s Todd Shull, Derya Hancock, Kyle Betar, and Coty Breeding on their success and contributions to the NASA NAFTU mission!