Five leaders from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Booster Landing Team received the inaugural Neil Armstrong Space Prize on Sept. 15, recognizing the work that made a vertical first-stage booster landing possible. The award went to Lars Blackmore, Shana Diez, Jon Edwards, Eduardo Velazquez and Yoshiaki Kuwata at the Cosmos Club in Washington.
The prize named them as the 2026 Neil Armstrong Space Prize winners. Their team’s landing work helped prove orbital rocket reusability is achievable, after the Falcon 9 first landed a booster in December 2015 following a launch of 11 commercial satellites into low-Earth orbit on Dec. 21, 2015.
Neil Armstrong at Purdue
Edwards’ path to SpaceX is part of the award’s wider link to Neil Armstrong. He drew inspiration from Armstrong and Jerry Ross before attending Purdue and starting his career at SpaceX. Armstrong earned a BS in aeronautical engineering from Purdue in 1955, tying the prize to a university connection that runs through the people honored on Sept. 15.
Blackmore said Armstrong spoke after the landing mission in a documentary and thanked everyone who did the work. He said, “He’s just kind of a nerdy guy like the rest of us, and he’s sitting there saying, ‘This is the interesting thing about it, and thanks to everyone who did all the work, and ultimately it was a really difficult technical problem that had to be solved. It’s not one person who did all of that.’”
Falcon 9 landing path
Blackmore also pointed to the technical line that led to the prize, starting with Grasshopper and running through later reuse milestones. “You could give a separate award for the experimental rocket that came before, which was called Grasshopper,” he said. He added: “For the first landing in 2015. The first reuse in 2017. The 100th reuse. And the 600th reuse.”
The complication in the story is that the award celebrates five named leaders, while Blackmore stressed that the result belonged to many people. That matters because the landing was not a single-step achievement; it was the end point of testing, redesign and repeated reuse milestones that turned a first booster recovery into a routine capability.
The inaugural prize now gives the team’s work an individual honor, but the record they are being recognized for remains collective. The award ceremony placed that history in one room at the Cosmos Club, and the team’s landing path stands as the technical foundation behind the prize itself.
