Automation for Vehicle and Crew Operations

Space missions are immensely costly endeavor – fault free function of the hardware and software used therein are highly critical to mission success. Being highly complex, manual intervention in operation, troubleshooting, and health management related areas are labor intensive and time consuming. On top of that with time the complexities of the systems are increasing, and the performance and availability requirements are become even more stringent. In the face of this situation, automation technologies are increasingly looked upon to perform critical tasks in short time, without manual intervention (or with minimal intervention) in error-free manner. Qualtech Systems, Inc., in collaboration with TRACLabs, Inc., proposes developing novel capabilities in the areas of health management, providing information for health and capability-related situational awareness, acquisition of data from onboard systems, and generating and invoking procedures for troubleshooting, restoration of operation, and/or initiating safety assurance processes.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.