Jamie Bennet
NASA is set to distribute $45 million to 249 companies and 39 research organizations as part of its small business grant programs.
The awards mark the initial round of agency funding under the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer efforts, NASA said Tuesday.
Eight of the recipients are minority-serving institutions, while an estimated 30 percent are first-time awardees. More than one-fourth of the selected small businesses are women-owned, veteran-owned, disadvantaged, or located in the Historically Underutilized Business Zone.
One of the awardees, a women-owned company named nou Systems, is working on a technology to support microbial monitoring in the International Space Station and other spacecraft environments.
A two-person enterprise named HyBird Space Systems was chosen for its novel retrobraking propulsion system, which is being designed to reduce orbital debris-related damage to spaceflight programs.
Milpitas, California-based 2pi Microwave is in partnership with the University of Maryland in College Park to develop a compact, high-performance lidar envisioned to produce an ultrawide field of view on space science missions.
“This program enables NASA to nurture pioneering ideas from a diversity of innovators across the country that may not attract the initial private industry funding needed to thrive,” said Gynelle Steele, deputy program executive for NASA’s SBIR/STTR program.
