SSTL founder, Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, yesterday received a prestigious new honour recognising and celebrating local innovation, creativity and commitment. The Guildford Roll of Honour is the result of collaboration between local partners the University of Surrey and Guildford Borough Council and will go on permanent display at the historic Guildhall in Guildford’s town centre.

Sir Martin was nominated in recognition of his contribution to the economy and the profile of Guildford worldwide, winning both national and international acclaim for his work spanning three decades. The inaugural award was presented at a special celebratory black tie dinner on Thursday 30th June with an audience of guests drawn from the worlds of business, education and public service.

Dr Matt Perkins, CEO of SSTL, accepted a prestigious industry award for outstanding contributions to technological advancement in aerospace, also involving elegance and commercial significance on Monday 24th January. SSTL was given this award by the Worshipful Company of Coachmakers, that promote excellence in the development of the trade within the modern aerospace, automotive and rail industries, and has been bestowed on the likes of Rolls Royce. SSTL was nominated by Vice-Admiral Timothy James Hamilton Laurence, CB, MVO, CSM, ADC(P)(I), and Matt Perkins accepted the award at a ceremony held at a dinner at the Savile Club.

Leading small satellite mission provider SSTL, has been recognised as one of the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For, and the only space industry company to make the listing.

SSTL ranked 89 out of the 997 companies that took part, with staff giving a top 20 score to finding their work stimulating, saying that they feel proud to be working for the world’s leading provider of small satellite missions.

Susan Jason, who's been with SSTL for 10 years explained the appeal of the British space innovators

There are lots of techie, geeky, space enthusiasts here. We have healthy, fiery debates. It’s amazing being able to contribute to such an important area.”

The survey showed that people go out of their way to help each other, with colleagues fun to work with and supportive - another top 20 score. SSTL was also recognised as a 1* (First Class) Best Companies To Work for the third year running.

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, Group Chairman and founder of SSTL has been instrumental in fostering this unique working environment

Since SSTL’s formation in 1985, highly motivated people have been the company’s most important asset. The innovation and total commitment that our staff bring to each and every project, enables us to satisfy our customers in a technically demanding field. We reflect this view in striving to make SSTL the very best place to work

Jackie Orme, Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development,, said:

Being a Best Company to Work For is not just about prestigious listings and names up in lights. Engaged staff understand when times are tough and will respond by going the extra mile. Their companies will be the ones best placed to emerge strongly in a recovery.

Time Magazine has selected Bundle Protocol testing and the download of an image of the Cape of Good Hope from UK-DMC as one of the ten best inventions of 2008.

In September, a satellite used the new protocol to relay an image of the Cape of Good Hope back to Earth.

The "Orbital Internet" discussed in this award report is enabled by the cooperation around CLEO - a Cisco router in low Earth orbit onboard the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellite, UK-DMC. Lloyd Wood developed this idea from the CLEO project with the support of Cisco Systems Space team, NASA Glenn Research Center and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd at the University of Surrey.

This is not the first award that those involved with CLEO have won for its pioneering work in breaking the final frontier of Internet domination, which includes the Times Higher Education Supplement award 2006 and Computerworld awards.

For this test the Bundle Protocol was implemented by reusing the ground-based testbed built for CLEO. NASA Glenn originally relied on this testbed for preparing the in-orbit CLEO router for use in the satelite environment, but it is now used to develop code for UK-DMC's onboard computers.

The Cape of Good Hope image was downloaded in these experiments by carrying it in the Bundle Protocol over Saratoga. The Bundle Protocol, developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group, is considered a leading candidate for creating the Interplanetary Internet. Saratoga is a fast file transfer protocol for hop-by-hop transfers on privately-owned networks - including the intermittently-connected networks used for delay-tolerant networking.

Find out more about the Internet in Orbit and this work leading to this award on the Bundle Protocol tests page.