Small businesses with pioneering ideas will get early-stage funding and other non-monetary support from NASA to help advance the agency’s missions as well as the aerospace ecosystem
USNC is one of the winners of the NASA SBIR Phase II awards. (Credit: Business Wire)
NASA has selected 110 American small businesses under phase 2 of its small business innovation research (SBIR) programme to continue exploration technology development with a total funding of nearly $95m.
From the programme, small businesses that have pioneering ideas will get early-stage funding and other non-monetary support from NASA to help advance the agency’s missions as well as the aerospace ecosystem.
The latest round of awards will be distributed across 123 projects.
The phase II winners will each get up to $750,000 to build, demonstrate, and deliver their technologies to NASA over a period of two years.
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said: “NASA is working toward ambitious, world-changing missions – missions that require innovative solutions from a variety of innovators, including small businesses.
“It’s crucial that we continue to find imaginative small businesses that have the expertise to help our agency solve our common challenges, and the SBIR program is one of the key ways we do that.”
According to NASA, companies that had received its SBIR phase 1 awards in the past had established the feasibility of their technologies successfully.
NASA SBIR and small business technology transfer (STTR) programmes deputy program executive Gynelle Steele said: “It is both a program mission and passion to increase the diversity of collaborators we’re bringing into the agency’s work.
“We are especially excited about the chance to work alongside our first-time companies as they bring their ideas from paper to prototype in Phase II.”
The winners of SBIR phase 2 awards include USNC Advanced Technologies, Teltrium Solutions, Gendell Associates, and Recon RF.
USNC Advanced Technologies, which is a division of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), has been selected by NASA to build a proposed ultra-high temperature material testing facility.
According to USNC, its specialised equipment can give an essential terrestrial environment for testing the performance of materials intended for use in space-based nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) systems.
Recently, NASA signed $278.5m worth of agreements with six US-based satellite communications providers for collaboration on space communications.