How judging works: from your pitch in Athlone to global judging

Road to HackAthlone: 7 days to go

Your project gets judged twice. First, our local judges in Athlone see your pitch on the Sunday. After the hackathon, experts from NASA, Space Agency Partners and industry judge projects from around the world, and the NASA Space Apps Challenge announces its Global Winners in January 2027.

Here’s how each round works, and what you need to do for both.

Two submissions, not one

It’s easy to forget that there are two.

Your Space Apps project page. This lives on your team’s page on spaceappschallenge.org, under the Project tab. It’s what makes your team eligible for global judging, and once it’s submitted, everyone on your team gets a participation certificate on their Space Apps profile. Space Apps opens project pages for editing on Saturday 14 November at 09:00 and closes submission on Sunday 15 November at 23:59, local time.

Your HackAthlone presentation. This is for our local judges on Sunday. We’ll confirm the local deadline and format before the event. In 2025, teams sent us their presentations before the Sunday session and presented in the order they submitted them.

Space Apps publishes its Project Submission Guide on 13 November. Read it before you start filling in your project page.

Round one: local judging in Athlone

The Space Apps Team Formation Guide puts it simply: “During the first round of judging, your team’s project will be evaluated by the Local Judges at the Local Event for which your team is registered.”

In 2025, each team had a 5-minute slot: 3 minutes to present, with a hard stop, and 2 minutes for questions from the judges. We’ll publish the 2026 rules before the event.

Four Athlone projects were nominated for global judging in 2025: Cea-SAR, Debugonauts, Dilly Dally and TerraWatt. You can read what the podium teams built in Inside the 2025 podium.

Round two: global judging

After the hackathon, according to the official FAQ, “Experts from NASA, Space Agency Partners, and industry leaders will evaluate the projects and select the winners.” The timeline:

• December 2026: Global Nominees, Global Finalists and Honourable Mentions are announced.
• January 2027: Global Winners are announced.

The 2026 judging criteria will be in the Space Apps Judging and Awards Guide, which comes out on 13 November. Until then, a few things are already clear from the 2026 rules:

• Answer a challenge. To be eligible for global judging and Global Awards, your project must respond to one of the 14 challenges.
• Cite everything. You must cite every source you used, even free and open-source ones. NASA reserves the right to remove nominations, awards or winner status from teams that don’t.
• Protect under-18s. Videos you submit shouldn’t include the recognisable names, voices or likenesses of anyone under 18.
• Don’t panic about polish. Space Apps says participants “are not expected to submit a fully developed project at the end”.

Building a short pitch

If the 2026 format matches 2025, you’ll have 3 minutes. That goes faster than you think. A simple shape works:

• The problem, in one sentence. Who has it, and why it matters.
• Your answer, shown. Get to the demo or the video quickly. Showing beats describing.
• The data. Which datasets you used and what they let you do.
• What’s next. What you’d build with another month, in a line or two.

Rehearse out loud with a timer on Saturday evening, then again on Sunday morning. One or two speakers is plenty. If the demo is live, have a backup video ready to play.

Answering the judges’ questions

Questions are a chance to show you understand your own project. Prepare short answers to the obvious ones:

• Where does your data come from, and how reliable is it?
• Who would use this, and how would they find it?
• What doesn’t work yet?
• What would it take to make it real?

“I don’t know, but here’s how we’d find out” is a perfectly good answer. A confident guess usually isn’t.

After Sunday

Once your project page is in, there’s nothing more to do but wait for December. It’s a good time to tidy your repository, thank your team and catch up on sleep.

Next Tuesday: the HackAthlone 2026 packing list.