We are pleased to share that PSS has been selected for two NASA Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) awards. The SBIR program enables small business to engage in research or research and development funded by the federal government. The purpose of a SBIR award is to move toward commercialization of a product. It’s a great program that allows small businesses to get a product on the market without putting up as much of their own internal research and development funds.

For a full list of all of the awards from this round, you can go here: https://sbir.nasa.gov/award_firm_list/selection_nid/63001 There, you can see PSS alongside the other winners. More information on the SBIR/STTR program can be found here.

Our first award is for a proposal called “Neural Space Navigator.” This proposal is for research that builds off of our Optical Navigation System (ONS), adding a new capability to the system: Terrain-relative navigation using neural networks. This capability comes at a critical time for NASA’s ongoing lunar exploration program, whose small Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) landers are scheduled to have their first missions in 2021. In Phase II, we would work with Lockheed Martin (LM). LM created the optical navigation system used on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Professor Michael Littman of Princeton University will be helping on this contract.

Our second award is for a proposal called “Multi-Megawatt Superconducting Motor for Electric Aircraft.” This proposal is for research toward a powerful superconducting motor for use in partially- and fully-electric aircraft. We are working with Superconducting Systems, Inc. from Massachusetts on this contract. There are some great ideas for ways to make aircraft more fuel-efficient using electric motors (see a NASA report here for some examples). This research will make lighter and higher power motors possible, powerful enough to propel large commercial aircraft, allowing some of the concepts in that report to become a reality.

This work is a spin-off of our nuclear fusion work, in particular our current NASA STTR (with PPPL) to study the effects of plasma pulses on superconducting coils.

We are very excited to be working with NASA on such interesting projects. The next step in the process is contract negotiations, in which the details of the proposed research are hammered out. If the next 6 months go well, these awards can serve as the basis for a Phase II SBIR, which awards significantly more time and resources.