Space Development Agency Director (SDA) Derek Tournear on Feb. 23 suggested that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobby Congress to raise the $2 million small business innovation research (SBIR) award topline and the $100 million ceiling on available SDA SBIR funding.
“I think that the limits for SBIR/STTR [small business technology transfer] funding are artificial and I really don’t see how that is a good benefit,” he said in a discussion with Sita Sonty, the CEO of Space Tango, at Retooling the Space Industry at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.
“We have about $100 million right now on SBIR contracts in SDA,” Tournear said. “We have a lot of small businesses that we would like to invest more on using SBIR funding, but we’re capped by law. I think that would be a good thing to lobby Congress and say, ‘Hey. It’s time to revisit this, and maybe the cap should not be $2 million for an SBIR.’ I would support that because that helps me utilize small businesses better.”
Increasing the individual award cap to $5 million and the overall $100 million SDA SBIR ceiling could serve as an example for other DoD agencies and inspire more small businesses to work with SDA, as such companies could build, test, and improve several small satellites in fairly short order, Sonty said.
SDA’s technology roadmap has given observers some confidence that low Earth orbit optically linked satellites in SDA’s Transport and Tracking Layers will be interoperable with the large, hundreds of millions of dollar geosynchronous orbit satellites under another U.S. Space Force element–Space Systems Command (SSC).
The traditional acquisition-bound Space and Missile Systems Center–now SSC–was not a big backer of the creation of the “upstart,” fast-to-field SDA in 2019–a new agency with an uncertain future, but that friction may be ameliorating with SDA’s adoption into the Space Force in October 2022.
DoD may soon release a commercial integration strategy from Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, the deputy chief of space operations, for strategy, plans, programs and requirements–a strategy that may further the emphasis on systems interoperability among SDA and SSC.
“We have a tech roadmap so that our tranches in our spirals for what we’re going to fly every two years to get to beyond line-of-sight targeting and advanced missile tracking and detection are out there,” Tournear said on Feb. 23. “We have a set of sub-technologies that we think will be viable in the year 2028, 2030, etc., but we’re not going to invest in them. We want other folks to invest in them. That’s why we’ve looked at the SBIR. If there’s a small company out there that has a technology in that given [sub-technology] area, I would say, reach out to your investors and say, ‘We know that if we do this, we can win a portion of this market because SDA is saying this is a technology will be a key differentiator that will allow us to have an offering they will buy.'”
“We buy satellites and constellations so we’re not going to go to a small business that developed the next better processor and let a direct contract with them,” Tournear said. “What I would say is, ‘Team with a prime or satellite builder and say, ‘Hey, look. We see this on SDA’s roadmap. We can deliver this. This will give you a differentiator and allow you to win a portion of the market that you’re not winning now and use that as a discussion point as to where the investments should go.”