Promise and Mentor Awards

Every year, during its Future Leaders Celebration, SSPI honors three space and satellite professionals with its Promise Award, recognizing outstanding achievement and the potential to play an even greater leadership role in the industry. Promise Award winners are the top 3 members of each year’s 20 Under 35 cohort. They are employees or entrepreneurs who have demonstrated initiative, creativity and problem-solving skills that created new capabilities, overcame major challenges, and ensured excellence in technology and service.

At the Dinner, SSPI also names its Mentor of the Year - an individual who has gone above and beyond the usual to attract young talent to the industry and help turn the promise of individual ability into careers with vital purpose for the world.

2024 Awards

Mackenzie Mason began her career at Boeing in 2014 as a Structural Dynamics Engineer. Her early contributions to the company were pivotal to the development of the 702MP/MP+ spacecraft, as she provided crucial recommendations to program management offices and customers and led numerous innovations in dynamic loads analysis and testing. Mackenzie spearheaded the dynamic shaker table move at Boeing’s El Segundo site, successfully completing a $5 million investment. She was also instrumental in the successful vibration, shock and acoustic qualification of hardware for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which ensured the successful launches of Orbital Flight Tests 1 and 2. Mackenzie was promoted to Engineering Manager for the Space Mission Systems Structural Dynamics department in 2021, where she now leads a team of 16 high-performing engineers.

Paige (Cooley) Webster joined ATLAS Space Operations in November of 2021 as a Technical Sales Engineer in Client Solutions after completing three internships at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her keen eye for identifying process improvements led her to spearhead the development of a new role that aligned the Operations, Integrations, Engineering and Client Solutions teams to create a more streamlined approach to customer relations. Paige’s exemplary performance in this new role she helped create led her to be promoted to her current position of Director of Commercial Solutions, a position in which she focuses primarily on sales and business development, developing ground station solutions for a wide variety of unique missions.

Bradley Williams began his career in aerospace at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, where he served as a Project Manager and Systems Engineer collaborating with faculty and research teams to identify proposal opportunities and develop spaceflight proposals for NASA. He went on to serve as the Director of Civil Space Programs at Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems (now Terran Orbital Corporation, LLAP), a role in which he led the development of project/program management processes that prepared the company for trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In his current position at NASA, Brad has worked on significant projects such as the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), the Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS), the HelioSwarm mission and the Solar Cruiser solar sail technology project. He also serves as Senior Program Executive for the NASA Space Weather Program.