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Tangram Flex, Inc announces it has been selected by SpaceWERX for a STTR Phase I in the amount of $250,000 to investigate how it's product, Tangram Pro, might enable In-space Service Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) capabilities being explored by the Department of the Air Force (DAF) and United States Space Force (USSF) through the Orbital Prime program.
Under this effort, Tangram Flex and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (ISI) are partnering to ensure that U.S. Space Force and commercial companies can rapidly, securely, and confidently upgrade on-orbit software components such that the system functions as intended and is cyber secure.
"Secure, safe, and fully functional software upgrades are critical to the success of on-orbit systems and to national security," says Brad Ginter, Program Manager at Tangram Flex. "Our team is uniquely positioned to support the U.S. Space Force in this initiative and looks forward to contributing to their mission."
Orbital Prime was created to accelerate the commercial ISAM market toward a use case of Active Debris Remediation. The Air Force Research Laboratory and SpaceWERX have partnered to streamline the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) process by accelerating the small business experience through a faster proposal to award timelines, changing the pool of potential applicants by expanding opportunities to small business and losing bureaucratic overhead by continually implementing process improvement changes in contract execution. The DAF began offering 'The Open Topic' SBIR/STTR program in 2018 which expanded the range of innovations the DAF funded and now on August 25th, 2022 Tangram Flex will continue its journey to create and provide innovative capabilities that strengthen the national defense of the United States of America.
