Thunderclap Labs won the ESA Technology Transfer Prize at ActInSpace 2026 - the sixth edition of the world's leading space innovation hackathon - competing against 1,621 participants from 23 countries across 53 cities.
Last week, the Thunderclap Labs team joined over 1,600 participants from 23 countries at ActInSpace 2026 — the global hackathon organized every two years by CNES and ESA, where teams compete to find commercial applications for real space technology patents.
Our team picked ESA Challenge #2: Height & Seek — a patent covering the use of reflected GNSS signals for ocean altimetry. The result was Thunder Wave, a concept for extracting high-value maritime insight from subtle sea surface height variations.
What Thunder Wave Does
The ocean surface isn't flat. It shifts constantly — by centimeters — in ways that reveal a lot about what's happening beneath. Thunder Wave leverages existing GNSS infrastructure to detect these small changes and identify non-recurring eddy currents: short-lived ocean dynamics that standard monitoring systems routinely miss.
These eddies matter. They affect water density, resistance, and current patterns in ways that directly impact ship fuel consumption and routing decisions. Missing them means wasted fuel and avoidable delays.
Thunder Wave proposes turning raw satellite signal reflections into a real-time maritime navigation layer — bridging space-based observation with everyday shipping operations. Beyond routing, the team identified two additional applications: early tsunami detection through rapid sea level anomaly recognition, and mesoscale ocean datasets for meteorological agencies that need finer-grained water surface data.
The Result
The judges awarded Thunder Wave a special ESA Technology Transfer Prize — ESA Academy training in Belgium. It's a recognition that the concept has legs beyond the hackathon floor.
The team that built it: Dominykas Remeika, Miglė Cirtautaitė, Orinta Ivanauskaitė, Julius Barauskas, Simonas Aukštuolis.
About ActInSpace
ActInSpace is run every two years by CNES and ESA. The 2026 edition saw teams across 23 countries work against the clock on challenges grounded in real, patented space technologies. The Lithuanian leg was organized by Visoriai Information Technology Park (VITP) and ESA BIC Lithuania.
The full ESA recap of ActInSpace 2026 is available here.