Awards – Cosmic Log

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin wins Collier Trophy

Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster stands on its West Texas landing pad after a successful touchdown. (Blue Origin Photo)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos keeps racking up the awards for his Blue Origin space venture: He just found out that Blue Origin is winning the prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy for its New Shepard suborbital spaceship.

The 2016 Collier Trophy was awarded to the Blue Origin team, headquartered in Kent, Wash., “for successfully demonstrating rocket booster reusability with the New Shepard human spaceflight vehicle through five successful test flights of a single booster and engine, all of which performed powered vertical landings on Earth,” the NAA said today in a statement.

The trophy is awarded annually to recognize the previous year’s greatest achievement in American aeronautics or astronautics. Past winners range from aviation pioneers Glenn Curtiss (1911 and 1912) and Orville Wright (1913) to the teams behind SpaceShipOne (2004), NASA’s Curiosity rover (2012) and NASA’s Dawn probe to Ceres (2015).

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Starfish tale stars in science awards

A mini-documentary about the die-off facing the West Coast’s sea stars has won KCTS producer/photographer Katie Campbell one of the country’s most prestigious science journalism awards.

The TV tale – titled “Is Alaska Safe for Sea Stars?” – focuses on scientists who are studying why starfish off the coast of Alaska were able to dodge the outbreak until now. It aired last year in October as part of KCTS’ “IN Close” documentary series, and now it’s won the top prize in the 2015 Kavli Science Journalism Awards’ spot news/feature reporting category for television.

“This piece was about far more than starfish,” David Baron, a former science editor for PRI’s “The World” who served as one of the competition’s judges, said intoday’s announcement of the winners. “By showing how biologists painstakingly collect data to understand the natural world, the story beautifully demostrates what it means to be a scientist.”

Campbell said she was “ecstatic” to be included among the winners, and said the award also recognizes “the important work being done by researchers on the front lines of the massive sea star wasting epidemic.”

The Science Journalism Awards are funded by the Kavli Foundation, administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and judged by independent panels of science journalists. (In 2002, one of the awards went to yours truly.) As a Gold Award winner, Campbell will receive $5,000 at the AAAS’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C., next February. For the first time, the awards program is also giving out Silver Awards worth $3,500, and honoring international as well as U.S.-based journalists.

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