Since 01 October 2015 Andreas Hammer is Managing Director at Tesat. In mid-September he spent a week in Backnang to get a first insight into our company. We asked Andreas Hammer to a short interview:

From 22 to 24 September 2015 the 64th German Aerospace Congress was held in Rostock. This scientific conference is organized annually by the German Society of Aerospace (DGLR) and is the most important event in this field in Germany. Tesat participated this year with five presentations in the program.

The first award of the proclaimed by Airbus Defence & Space "Awards for Excellence" was a great success: from 23 March to 30 April 2015 288 projects were submitted, including five applications from Tesat. Three of them have taken the first hurdles in the selection process successfully!

This year total of 86 children aged between six and fourteen years took part in the summer holiday program at Tesat. In July and August four craft mornings were organized, which were under the motto "satellites". The program was open to both children of Tesat employees and children who had applied through the holiday program of the city of Backnang.

The 5th AOK corporate run in Waiblingen, which took place on September 16, 2015 was carried out at optimum running weather on a 5.4 km circular route in the floodplains of the Rems. About 1450 runners were at the start, including 15 Tesat Space Runners - as many as never before since the first participation in this corporate run in 2012.

It was a tough job, but on September 1, 2015 it was to come: Our new exhibition foyer was opened in the presence of the two parliamentary secretaries Brigitte Zypries and Christian Lange. Even the mayor of Backnang, Dr. Frank Nopper, and Andreas Hammer, the successor of Peter Schlote were on site. And around 500 colleagues who wanted to throw a first look at our new boss.

LISA Pathfinder, the technology demonstrator of the ESA for the detection of gravitational waves, is now ready for transport to the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. From there it will start in November into space. The 1.9-ton spacecraft, for which Airbus Defence and Space is the prime contractor, will be launched aboard a European Vega rocket.

On July 24, 2015 the smart foxes - preschool children of the kindergarten in Maubach - were here for the sixth time in the project "Technolino" visiting us. Target of Technolino, a project of Südwestmetall, is to introduce children early to the subjects natural science and technology.

In the early morning of June 23 2015, the Earth observation satellite Sentinel-2A was launched on board a Vega launcher from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Sentinel-2A is the second satellite, which was launched into orbit as part of the European environmental monitoring program Copernicus.

On June 17, a group of the Students Engineer Academy (SIA) of the Herzog-Christoph-Gymnasium in Beilstein visited us at Tesat. Also present was the teacher Brigitte Kobiela, who is well known in Tesat for many years. The contact is made, since in 2012 at the fair "Mission future - from Baden-Württemberg into Space" at a student competition students of Mrs. Kobiela were among the winners.