NASA Chooses Aerospace Tech Proposals for Phase 2 Funds; Steve Jurczyk Comments

Eight technology proposals from organizations in the academia, private and public sector have been selected for the second phase of NASA’s aerospace research and development program with up to $500,000 in funds for each submission.

Proposers will develop for two years the concepts funded under the first phase of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program and selected through a peer review process, NASA said Friday.

NASA awarded the first phase contracts for the development of aerospace technologies to 13 proposals in April 2016.

“The NIAC program is one of the ways NASA engages the U.S. scientific and engineering communities, including agency civil servants, by challenging them to come up with some of the most visionary aerospace concepts,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s space technology mission directorate.

Under the program’s second stage, awardees will work to polish the ideas conceived in the previous phase in order to implement the technology.

The selected projects are:

• Advancing Torpor Inducing Transfer Habitats for Human Stasis to Mars by John Bradford of Space Works
• Cryogenic Selective Surfaces by Robert Youngquist from Kennedy Space Center
• Directed Energy Interstellar Study by Philip Lubin from the University of California in Santa Barbara
• Experimental Demonstration and System Analysis for Plasmonic Force Propulsion by Joshua Rovey from the University of Missouri
• Flight Demonstration of Novel Atmospheric Satellite Concept by William Engblom from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
• Further Development of Aperture: A Precise Extremely Large Reflective Telescope Using Re-configurable Elements by Melville Ulmer from Northwestern University
• Magnetoshell Aerocapture for Manned Missions and Planetary Deep Space Orbiters by David Kirtley from MSNW
• Tensegrity Approaches to In-Space Construction of a 1g Growable Habitat by Robert Skelton from Texas Engineering Experiment Station

Studies under the second phase will take 10 years to mature the concepts and technologies prior to their actual use in NASA missions.