In the Spotlight: Nammo webinar

The latest spotlight webinar on Thursday 29 January we featured Nammo, an international aerospace and defence company headquartered in Norway, specialising in ammunition, rocket motors, and space propulsion systems. With over 3,700 employees across 11 countries including at Westcott in the UK, Nammo serves both defence and commercial markets, including advanced space missions.

Shining a light on the project management which has enabled the success of the LEROS 4 engine, a high-performance bipropellant thruster designed for deep-space missions which has undergone extensive hot-fire testing at the UK’s National Space Propulsion Test Facility in Westcott.

The LEROS 4 famously manoeuvred Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander which touched down on the surface of the moon on Monday 3 March 2025.

The speaker panel from Nammo also described RELIANCE, a next-generation propulsion solution, complementing its proven LEROS engines and supporting Europe’s ambitions for Mars-return and lunar logistics missions.

This webinar shone a light on the project management which has enabled their many successes.

 

Webinar resources

The panel have kindly allowed their presented material to be made available for viewing. The webinar recording on Vimeo and the slides on Slideshare, will soon be available in our APM resources area and also embedded below for reference.

The panel are reviewing the questions submitted during the broadcast, and as an additional resource the answers will be added shortly.

This webinar content is suitable for professionals with any knowledge level of the project profession.

 

Speaker panel
Jade Bell, Karolina Zatorksa, Luke Smith and Rosario Jacobsen

Jade Bell, Marketing and Comms Associate, Nammo

With a Bachelor’s degree in Media and Communications, you could say I was over the moon when I landed a job as a Comms Intern at Nammo UK 2.5 years ago. I had no prior experience or knowledge of the space sector, but I quickly feel in love with it. Five months into the job, Nammo offered me a permanent position as a Marketing and Comms Associate. I’ve been involved in many different projects but most recently I was in charge of managing the RELIANCE engine PR campaign. I’m not a project manager but I completed my PFQ earlier this year which has really helped with structuring the planning process of my PR campaigns.

Karolina Zatorksa, Senior Project Manager, Nammo

With an MEng in Aeronautics and Astronautics, I was thrilled to start my career as a Propulsion Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space – firstly in Design, and then in Test. It was during my time as a Lead Propulsion Test Engineer where I found my passion for project management, as I was responsible for work package management of wider projects.

I subsequently joined Nammo and began my journey in project management, leading various LEROS engines projects through all phases of the life cycle - from proposal through to delivery. Today, I am responsible for the Chemical Propulsion Product Line, and actively developing my capabilities towards Programme Management. 



Luke Smith, Project Manager, Nammo

My career started in the automotive industry as a health, safety and environment manager implementing ISO 14001 and ISO18001 management systems, as part of the role I had to manage the contractors and sub-contractors of large scale industrial projects and slowly transitioned into owning industrial projects along side my day to day role.

Since then I have transitioned into full time project management for new product introduction including the new range rover and range rover sport tailgates, Private jet and commercial airliner polymer seals and finally Nammo UK where I manage both the LEROS 4 HTAE engine (made famous by the Blue Ghost Lunar Lander) and the IPCU/EPR system development and industrialisation.

Rosario Jacobsen, Project Manager, Nammo

With a degree in Aerospace Engineering and an MSc in Astronautics and Space Engineering, I began my professional career as a Design Engineer working within the commercial aviation industry, on Airbus A350 Galleys. It was while working on this project that I was steered into project management. I found that my technical background, knowledge of the processes and product, and relationships with the various teams developing the galleys were key to carrying out my role as project manager and this was (and has continued to be) what I most enjoy within the role. I had been converted.

I then joined Nammo in 2021 and started my work on the build of a new test facility to support the RELIANCE engine pre-development activities for ESA. With a brief stint managing the LEROS 4 activities for the Blue Ghost Lander while the project management team was growing, my role  then focused on RELIANCE engine, which has now progressed beyond its pre-development contract with ESA and has been selected as the main engine for ESA's Argonaut Lunar Lander.

 

Hosted by
Mark Heelis, APM International Space Sector Interest Network Deputy Lead volunteer

Mark is the Deputy Lead for the Association for Project Management’s (APM) International Space Sector Interest Network. Established in 2024, the award winning Interest Network aims to connect practitioners, share best practices, and support future missions and sector ambitions through collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Mark is a Programme Manager with extensive experience delivering complex, transformational projects across engineering and technology domains. At the Satellite Applications Catapult, Mark plays a pivotal role in advancing the UK space sector, with a particular focus on emerging applications such as in-space logistics services and microgravity manufacturing.