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news and views of MDAStar Wars was SDIO, became BMDO, and is now MDA Year 1996..... Year 1997 Year 1998 Year 1999 Year 2000 Year 2001Ready. the tracking radars and interceptor rockets of a new American missile defense system can be turned on at any time to respond to an emerging crisis in Asia, senior military officers said ... While the new system is limited, it is the most extensive anti-ballistic missile system the Pentagon has fielded since the Safeguard ABM system ... in 1975 which Congress immediately voted to shut down [Thom Shanker, New York Times, Oct 3] Send More Billions. success when an interceptor collided with a mock warhead high over the Pacific, Pentagon officials said. A target missile was launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, and tracked by radar at Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento. The interceptor missile was fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Santa Barbara, Calif., striking the target warhead about eight minutes later, officials said. “This was a very operationally realistic test,” said MDA. The technology has been steadily advancing since the 1960s; send more billions. Love That Analysis. MDA's new list of Phase 1 SBIRs teems with a strange mix of analysis and electronics materials. Automated Interceptor to Target Assignment Based on Proven, Advanced Techniques for Planning, Resource Allocation, and Constraint Satisfaction , IM Modeling/Simulation Tool for KEI Dynamic/Thermal Loads Associated with Stage Separation , and Linear-mode, Wide FOV, Single Photon Counting APD Ladar Array . Hard to find a single mind at the helm, more like a mere internal competition for a piece of the budget that lets each sub-department have its own SBIR philosophy after which the so-called program manager staples together the list.
Program As Usual. MDA's most recent round-up of invitations for Phase II SBIR proposals asked five questions: 1) Prototype/Demonstration: What is being offered at the end of Phase II?; Benefits/Capabilities: Why is it important? This is specific and quantitative.; Program Benefit: Why it is important to a MDA Program. This is specific and quantitative.; Partnership: Who are the partners and what are their commitment? Funding? Facilities? Etc?; Cost . A classic search for immediate program benefits including a table for projecting the outcome into the manufacturing schedule (presuming there will even be such manufacturing). With no curiosity on such aspects as degree of innovation, technical risk, and spin-off potential, which are the legislated (but often ignored) objectives of SBIR, MDA sees SBIR as merely a small business portion of its mainline programs. What's more, MDA has repeatedly tried to cut its SBIR program below the mandated minima. If you are looking for imagination and support for your innovative ideas, don't expect MDA to show much enthusiasm until you can predict exactly when your idea will fit into its planned production schedule. MDA also accepts as innovation a Little Smart Engineering. The Phase 1 SBIR company will surely succeed in a scheme that will team up with Lockheed Martin Missile and Fire Control (LMMFC-D) to manufacture and evaluate lightweight hybrid composites for MDA’s applications. ... In particular, develop and manufacture IM shipping containers for SRM up to 50-in in diameter. In addition to using SBIR for what sounds like routine engineering, Phase 2 will probably shift a hunk (could be half) of the SBIR money to a large DOD aerospace contractor - a long held MDA financial goal. Don't worry though, when and if challenged (unlikely) both MDA and the company will shriek in defense of the high degree of innovation since there are hardly any objective standards for innovation. I wonder why MDA thinks a small company would have any advantage over the scillions of established US container companies in designing and building a box from known materials. The likely answer is that MDA does not think so, but they need a box and don't want to spend mainline R&D funds when they can use the distasteful SBIR. MDA Seeks Knowledge. Innovation in SBIR? It's whatever the agency says it is, and MDA regularly says it as mere knowledge, as in the expected product from conventional math model projects such as Advanced models and codes are required to account for all relevant chemical/physical phenomena from propellant combustion through engine performance to plume signature. To that end, relevant phenomena are identified and grouped by category (engine/core flow chemistry, plume/atmosphere molecular interaction, core/interaction spectral radiation) and evaluated against existing models and codes. Applicable tools and current deficiencies are identified and described. Methods are outlined to fill all apparent gaps and remedy all known deficiencies as the basis for a complete physical model incorporated in seamless simulation software supported by documented validation demonstrations. Math models of reacting flow? Been going on at universities for as long as computers could make numerical scientific calculations. Every respectable technical university has at least two professors doing it. Future market potential? Who cares? MDA gets another math model it may use and the performing company gets some money. No doubt it will "succeed" in Phase 1 in showing that such calculations are feasible. Would a Phase 2 produce the perfect model? Ask all those professors. Will the company get a Phase 2? Odds seem good since it has already had $1.8M Phase 2 SBIR from MDA in the last five years for such modeling studies. Hey, it's intellectually interesting work, clean hands, and decent salary for life-style companies. MDA has lots of money. Therefore, it legally must have lots of SBIR, if (a real if) it follows the law's mandate. If you're intending to mine that lode, you might read MDA's record of its recent Industry Day http://www.winbmdo.com/conferences/File1.pdf Once you read through process gibberish and realize that these folks are pure bureaucrats' using word slides they can read to a presumed illiterate audience, you get to the SBIR mission slide. It says nothing about future investment, or other criteria that proposers can use as a guide. The one clue word is relevance, which unfortunately means something only to the MDA guys, and their ideas keep changing anyway as system development takes its twists and turns and blind alleys. The bottom line: it's like shooting blind. Try the best thing you know how to do, especially if you know that no one else can do anywhere near as well. Advanced Technology and the Importance of SBIR 9::10AM Mr. Gary Payton/Deputy, MD/Advanced Systems (Invited) will lead off MDA's Small Business Innovation Research Industry Day. MDA says it wants to explain the esoteric military terms of missile defense with which it announces its SBIR topics to innovative companies. In practice the really innovative companies want foremost to advance their technologies with DOD's money as a merely useful agent. The likely conference beneficiaries will be the R&D service companies who can talk directly to MDA technologists and managers (if any important ones actually show up) about what MDA wants to fund. But rather than Washington conferences to which companies have to travel and pay for an unknowable benefit, MDA could clarify its attitude by expressing its needs and criteria on its website in terms that companies with no prior knowledge of missile defense could understand. Surely a bleeding edge technology program could harness some leading edge info technology to deliver its message. Sign up with the National Defense Industrial AssociationSign up with the National Defense Industrial Association by Aug 1 The real reason for such a conference remains obscure (at least to me) since MDA assails SBIR as a annoying inconvenience and an oppressive tax on the "real" programs. Former astronaut, gentleman, and general Payton should know something about the subject since he had some responsibility for SBIR in both SDIO and NASA. In SDIO he had the good sense to let the guys who knew the SBIR law's intentions run the program with the intent of extracting the maximum available benefit for all concerned given the infancy of really innovative technologies. Open Innovation Competition. MDA has appointed an Advanced Systems Innovation Cell (ASIC) to pursue and assess innovative concepts and develop algorithms to improve BMDS capability. All and sundry are invited to send in a five-pager until Jan 06. MDA's spring Tech Applications quarterly also announces a similar program for universities at the $150-200K level for three years. The test was not a failure, it just was not completed. "We weren't able to complete the test that we had planned. I definitely wouldn't categorize it as a setback of any kind. The test had been planned for a while so it's a disappointment for those of us who were working on it. We will isolate the anomaly and fix it." [Washington Post, Dec 17] Thus MDA "explained" that they started the test sequence which failed before reaching launch. Maybe MDA will take the same attitude when an SBIR contractor has a problem with a test in an SBIR contract. Maybe. The Center for Defense Information has a report on an October Missile Defence Conference in London where CDI Vice President Theresa Hitchens gave a missile defense update and speculated on the USAF’s plans for space. She noted that The long-troubled Airborne Laser (ABL) is teetering on the brink of cancellation. Will ABL actually die? Nah, there's an unwritten rule that each service gets a "fair" share of the MDA pie. CDI also notes that MDA got $10B for next year; it takes a lot of work to spend $10B. Dig a Eurohole and Fill It With ... viewgraphs. Star Wars says it plans to deploy to Europe in five years which means the digging has to start soon, sooner than the tests that prove such a system would even work. UK, Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary are all mentioned as candidates for the holes that would defend Europe against ... But they have spend their politically driven $10B a year on something visible. [story from The Independent, Nov 21] In Love With Foam. MDA must have loved the foams as it awarded three Phase 2 SBIRs totaling $4.8M last year to Touchstone Research Labs (Tridelphia, WV) in a field crowded with many many materials competitors. The three published abstracts have not a single number by which an outsider could begin to judge how innovative or economic the allegedly new technologies really are. What little the abstracts reveal suggests a rather mature technology being bought in a pseudo-procurement instead of a nursery stage innovation needing a start. Meanwhile, MDA should have tons of money for SBIR as it seems to lose battle after battle to avoid spending its required minimum. Its Phase 1 closes October 15. MDA Claims Defense. MDA's latest press release announces yet another interceptor installed in what is implied as a national defense. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency emplaced the fourth interceptor missile designed to intercept and destroy a long-range ballistic missile into its underground silo at Ft. Greely, Alaska ... The interceptors are part of an integrated system of sensors, ground and sea-based radars and an advanced command and control, battle management and communication system designed to detect, track and launch an interceptor to destroy a target warhead before it can reach its intended target in any of our 50 states. Although the system will initially have a limited capability when it becomes operational later this year, it will mark the first time the United States has a capability to defend the entire country against a limited attack by a long-range ballistic missile. Such pabulum designed for political campaigns avoids hard questions about whether it will work at all against a real opponent (only the tooth fairy knows), if so with what reliability (nowhere enough testing to assign any credible estimate, when it will be wholly national (no time soon), etc. An SBIR evaluator might ask which of all the technology funded by SDIO's SBIR since 1985 made it into the system that surely has used some high tech advances 19 years later. MDA Changes. In its seemingly endless quest for perfection, MDA has made two changes to its SBIR solicitation terms for October 15. two revisions to the MDA 04.4 SBIR Solicitation Instructions: you can propose a $50K six-month add-on option, with a max of $150K, and its Fast Track "will continue" (whatever that means). MDA recently threw itself back 15 years in its SBIR approach and is now learning what we earlier managers had already learned. The $150K Phase 1 hints at wanting minor projects that can be finished quickly so they can be incorporated in some MDA program. Service, rather than innovation, would be favored. After all, innovation is a lot more trouble to adopt than a new coat of paint. Why they re-state their Fast Track is hard to fathom. The least likely reason is that they discovered that projects with third-party cash are a lot better than stuff that only a government could love. The most likely is that they got political or legal flak from deviating from published DOD policy. Gotta Re-Organize; We're in Deep Doo-Doo. The Missile Defense Agency Director wants to capitalize on the extraordinarily hard work undertaken throughout the agency to develop and deliver Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) capabilities. Our purpose is to realize the solidarity of your hard work, reduce the distractions and facilitate the commonality in our focus, and maximize the efficient utilization of MDA resources. The goal is to eliminate wasted energy and encourage harmonizing individual energies towards the common vision to develop and field an integrated BMDS capable of providing a layered defense for the homeland, deployed forces, friends, and allies against ballistic missiles of all ranges in all phases of flight. I am forming the BMDS Integration Working Group (IWG) to harmonize the separate element contracts into a coherent whole. The IWG will need to have insightful discussions, innovative coordinate actions, and a collegial environment to form and evaluate alternatives that reward integrated BMDS demonstrated capabilities. [Al Kamen, Washington Post, Sep 13, quoting a BMDO functionary] That's bureau-speak for "it doesn't work and it's time for a plan B that we don't have" MDA Phase 2 Bafflegab. MDA published a section "explaining" its process for Phase 2 SBIR invitation and review. An SBIR Topic Sponsor (either an MDA Element MDA Project Office or MDA Functional Area Office) begins the process for a Phase II Invitation by reviewing the Phase I work of each contractor (along with the Contract Technical Monitor) and making a recommendation on what Phase I efforts should continue into Phase II. The MDA Sponsor recommendation is based on several criteria. The Phase II Prototype/Demonstration (What is being offered at the end of Phase II?), Phase II Benefits/Capabilities (Why it is important), Phase II Program Benefit (Why it is important to an MDA Program), Phase II Partnership (Who are the partners and what are their commitment? Funding? Facilities? Etc? This also can include Phase III partners), and the Potential Phase II Cost. This is the basic business case for a Phase II invitation and requires communication between the MDA Program, the Phase I SBIR Offeror, and the Phase I Technical Monitor. An MDA SBIR Working Group then reviews the entire Phase II Invitation list and forwards their recommendations to the MDA Source Selection Authority for final approval. The kind of stuff written by and for the crats with little info from which a competitor can judge the odds. Not surprising since the entire cost of proposing rests on the small company. All signs, though, point to overriding weight given to "what's in it for us?" - Why it is important to an MDA Program. To score well on that criterion, the proposer has to get inside the skin of the MDA tech guys - an MDA Element MDA Project Office or MDA Functional Area Office - who shy from talking to the public. To reach them the company has to pound on the doors insisting on its right to access public officials. The chief architect and operator of MDA's SBIR is Dr Charlie Infosino and the small business advocate is Mr Stephen Moss. What you want from them is the names and contact means for getting to the individuals who will opine on whether your proposal is slick or schlock on the criterion of value to MDA. Some of the topics give you a start with the name and address of someone with a mda.mil e-mail address. Baby Steps, Baby Impact. MDA's list of Phase 1 awards area phantasmagoria of baby steps for purely military technologies by companies that have been doing military funded SBIRs for a long time. Economic spillover will be zip, thereby putting a great burden on MDA's Tech Applications people to advertise lemonade. If you are even thinking remotely about proposing to MDA's next solicitation in October, read the abstracts in your field, go visit the companies, think about partnering with one of them, learn the MDA lingo of sub-programs that would use your stuff, use or invent figures-of-merit that MDA would respond to, call around to the MDA points of contact to find the technical people who review proposals. In short, get as far into bed with MDA's ideology as you can, because the winners are going to be the companies who cater to MDA's fantasy of eliminating SBIR altogether in favor of regular incremental improvements in established technologies and programs. Ugh! Thinking MDA SBIR? Think mature. Clark-MXR (Ann Arbor, MI) got
a Phase 2 to build a manufacturing workstation (the “ABL”
Workstation) capable of drilling precisely contoured holes in various materials specifically
for the Airborne Laser. MDA's Tech
Applications quarterly - Update - describes the non-proprietary (we hope)
aspects of the technology. The Airborne Laser is a flying dream to shoot down
missiles in their launch phase from a not-too-distant airplane with a high power
laser. Tactically, such a plane would have to be in the air on alert within
range and not get shot down itself by any power that was strong and daring
enough to launch a missile against the USA. Unfortunately for SBIR, such a
project borders on using SBIR for procurement rather than for nurturing infant
technology. Which is wholly in line with MDA's recent decision that
nurturing was a waste of their money and that direct service was more
efficient. The next chance to propose a new idea that has been thoroughly
tested to MDA is unknown since MDA has chosen NOT to play in DOD's summer
solicitation, Miracle scheduled for September. If all goes according to the political re-election plan, MDA will declare operational readiness of whatever they have on the ground in September. But not without a lot of naysayers claiming it has never been tried in even simulated anger and will still be in a state of design flux. But then, we did that with ICBMs in the 50s and 60s and who knows whether they would have worked as planned. The MDA boss, Gen Kadish, must be under intense political pressure to make it sound like the dream works even though his military experience says don't risk battles with untried stuff. Fortunately, the ICBMs were never put to the test, and it is likely that MDA's first few generations won't ever be tested either. For now, their only mission is to shoot down Democrats. Aficionados of ICBM can see a fully preserved silo with a demonstration what can be done when money is no object. It's a Titan site just south of Tucson. Prognostics, modeling, and analysis. Got a little company that likes clean hands and mathematics? Go find a non-profit that likes the same things - they're all over the map, and they're usually called universities. Write an STTR proposal to MDA which last year funded 70% of proposals presented, and heavily on analysis. They even saw high innovation in yet another math model of the thermal decomposition of H2O2. Due April 15. Although MDA has a huge innovation challenge to shoot down missiles, that challenge does not seem to extend to SBIR/STTR where MDA seeks incremental advances in knowledge. Anti-Democrat Missiles. So, says the White House, we don't know if they will work with acceptable reliability against ICBMs; we are sure they will work against Democrats though in an election year. The Bushies want to install, at considerable taxpayer expense, a BMDO system that experts say is at best a poor chance. In December 2002, President Bush called for a system by the end of this year. Republican presidents love to call for wonderful defenses which if they worked would be indeed wonderful. But Weapons experts outside the Pentagon have argued that there is no imminent threat that would justify the program's huge expenditures, up $1.2 billion from the previous year, and the deployment of a system whose capabilities are unknown. [New York Times, Mar 12] Is the technology ready? Some of it. Is the system ready? Who knows. Unfortunately for Bush's imitation of Reagan, there is no longer a strategic opponent we can spend to death regardless of whether the deployed systems actually work. MDA's technology commercialization arm won a Distinguished Technical Communication award from the Society for Technical Communication. The award actually goes to MDA's contractor - the National Technology Transfer Center-Washington Operations (WO)- which evolved from an excellent in-house office to a well-run contractor operation as a subsidiary of the NTTC. The NTTC itself is a Senator Byrd pork project for West Virginia. In those days SDIO (the first Republican name for MDA) cared about tech transfer and spin-off of its leading edge tech research. WO has kept the operation alive and sparkling despite MDA's slide into conventional military development of a weapons system. See WO in action. Grinding away until it's economic. BMDO's Tech Applications report touts the spin-offs for many companies funded by MDA over the years. Most are SBIR companies that spend only 2.5% of MDA's R&D money. The first story is Pyrograf-III from Applied Sciences (Cedarville, OH) which had been grinding away on carbon fibers for nearly two decades. It has had at least 30 Phase 1 SBIRs and 7 Phase 2s from DOD since 1987.plus twelve Phase 1s and five Phase 2s from other agencies plus some piece of an ATP award to Goodrich et al. It has grown from four employees then to 21 employees now and MDA's report claims the production capacity if fully subscribed for 70,000 pounds a year (with "plans to double capacity") at $100 a pound. Not too many industrial products can be sold with $100/pound major ingredients. Applied Sciences' history raises the obvious policy question; what does the government think it is doing in long term bare survival funding for a product that may never be economic? Is there any government-wide strategy as there might be in a large industrial firm investing in a potential new supplier or product source? The likely answer is that the government has no strategy (other than the political move of apportioning a part of R&D funding to small companies); each agency does whatever it likes with little regard to any grand investment strategy. No agency is responsible for the intelligent investment of any other agency's funds, nor of intelligent investment of government funds as a whole. There is NO management review of investments, no investment board of directors, no one held accountable for return on investment. MDA Lets Loose. MDA posted a horde of SBIR and STTR awards on its website. 424 Phase 1 SBIRs (from 1860 proposals), 44 Phase 1 STTRs, and 109 SBIR Phase 2s. That's enough to consume a big share, say $80M of even the huge MDA budget. .Lots of awards to companies who have been speaking SBIR to DOD agencies for two decades; the same companies whose names parade through the award lists from the military services. And for safe projects unlikely to have much impact once the SBIR money is spent. One Phase 2 will do some mods to a math model of a burn-'em-up laser - the kind of science that any university can do with zero market potential. Ah well, it's MDA's money to waste if they want; they'll never be held to any account except having handed out the money to the target class. The SBIR advocates get their wish - their members get a share of the pie. Among the many awards for math models are a few things that sound like innovative technology with a future in the hands of companies that have an real market mindset: Crystal IS, Belford Research, Crystal Research, IPITEK, Peregrine Semiconductor, Sensors Unlimited. The acid test, of course, comes later in the Phase 2 competition, but judging by the first dozen awards (announcement delayed for the others), the prospects are bleak. If you won a Phase 1, get to know as many MDA people as you can since that is the only way you can know the magic words they are looking for and even those words are subject to arbitrary change. The Public - Who Cares? MDA has notified at least some winners from the Phase 1 winter competition that extended into spring with the receipt fiasco, and some Phase 2 winners although the web site denies that 2003 yet exists. Ah well, the first law of SBIR is to pass out the money, not to tell the public what's happening. Congress can forgive a lot of sins except dodging payouts to constituent groups. But it does feel like MDA has dumped its nearly two-decade enthusiasm for engaging the public - another sign of bureaucratic takeover. Innovate! That's MDA's prime directive to small technology companies undertaking early-stage research in its SBIR program, says the opening line in MDA's Tech Transfer newsletter MDA Update. Could the right hand not know what the left hand is doing? Certainly the right hand - MDA's SBIR program operators - have made it clear to SBIR hopefuls that nothing will be funded without letters of credit from MDA staffers. What's With MDA's Fast Track? Even though MDA was the example that inspired DOD's Fast Track, all signals now are that MDA has abandoned FT despite formal participation under the DOD solicitation. Stories emanating from MDA FT applicants are that it is neither fast nor a track. MDA has apparently taken the attitude that Fast Track is no different than regular Phase 2 applications: batch processing, disdain for private support, and a requirement that applicants obtain a support letter from a high MDA official. The support letter requirement shifts the advantage to companies who work the Pentagon on the inside and to the disadvantage of companies with innovative ideas that were not invented at MDA (the NIH syndrome). Working against MDA's apparent attitude problem is the fact that MDA is not spending the required SBIR funding. Its website shows far to few Phase 2s selected for the money that it must spend. Sounds like a replay of the FY2002 attempt to scuttle SBIR by financial shenanigans. It will either have to defy Congress or abandon its requirements for hand-holding of MDA officials by every Phase 2 hopeful. The officials have neither the time nor the interest to entertain all those companies for the effort it takes to work up a deal. Even though MDA's SBIR has turned non-commercial the MDA Tech Transfer group National Technology Transfer Center's Washington Operations (NTTC-WO) won a prize - the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Award of Excellence for its 2002 special report "MDA Technologies: Tools to Counter Terrorism." Market 2002 Performance of BMDO SBIR Companies
Some Other SBIR Public Companies Not Supported by BMDO
MDA Dances the Shuffle. Last year MDA tried to slough off half its SBIR funding, but no other DOD agency would take up the slack. Now MDA says that because of that shuffle, it could not obligate its legal share and therefore it should not have to ever obligate it. $30M fell into the hole. Murder your parents and throw yourself on the mercy of the court as an orphan. But the political arm of SBIR - SBTC - has raised the alarm in Congress that MDA should not be allowed such fruits of its crimes. SBTC has also notified DOD that it will file a brief with GAO to get DOD to re-open the fouled SBIR solicitation 2003.1. MDA Goes Eclectic for STTR. Even though the proposal aren't yet in for SBIR, MDA has already published its 2003 STTR topics, an eclectic bunch of requirements: predicitng the future, modeling the decomposition of H2O2, IR materials modeling, COIL lasers, GPS/INS coupling. Innovative vision was shelved again in favor of predictable results from incremental projects. Unfortunately for the reputation of DOD's SBIR, such topics suggest coziness between several MDA staffers and specific contractors for narrow specialized subjects. Modeling the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide sounds particularly odd: the chemistry is well known, tons of academics have already worked on the problem, the odds of any follow-on or spin-off are minuscule, and a small company has no inherent advantage over large enterprises in such a task. It is merely a way to hijack SBIR to do ordinary R&D tasks that would otherwise be done by large entities. DARPA, by contrast starts its Topic 001 with Commercial Development. of ...... , followed by Topic 2's COTS-Based .... Proposals Due April 16 MDA revealed eight more Phase 2 SBIR winners. Three went to veterans and three sound like only modest innovation. The rest sound reasonably innovative in technologies with a future. No word on whether any were Fast Track. Fast Track? Bah, humbug, hints MDA, a Fast Track is just another Phase 2 proposal with a somewhat better commercialization story. Noises emanating from MDA's SBIR office, which is the official mouthpiece but no longer the decision maker, say that the DOD Fast Track standards do not apply to MDA (even if they still might apply to DOD). Specifically, the DOD rules promise Fast Track when the company has timely submission, matching cash, and technical sufficiency. It's the technical sufficiency part that MDA seems to have abandoned in favor of the usual relevancy to existing programs. Thus Fast Track proposals have to run the same gamut of successive committee approvals in which any committee has an effective veto. That's the usual government way where every office holds a veto over any new action. Third party cash as a validator of the technology's value no longer impresses the technocrats who focus most of their daily energy on getting a bigger piece of next year's budget. Fuzzy Standards at MDA. A Phase 1 MDA SBIR winner briefed his technical manager towards the end of the contract with a view to learning what matters for Phase 2. The manager reported that MDA, for which he only acts as a contracting agent says, "program needs", which is bureau-speak for we'll do whatever we want. Further advice was that "matching funds and Fast Track do not have much weight in the selection of phase IIs". What that means for Phase 1 winners is that you must find, by whatever means, a friendly face in MDA which usually presents a "don't bother us" face to the public, especially to small inexperienced companies. Well, you might ask, "if they don't known what they want for Phase 2, why did they give us a Phase 1?" Good question. They do have tons of money that they would like to spend outside SBIR but may not have the nerve to shortchange SBIR below the legally mandated minimum. The days of a consistent innovation and future potential standard for SDIO/BMDO/MDA Phase 2s are over, done, finis. There's no single mind deciding and no standard available to an outsider.
MDA's 2003.1 SBIR topics have become the standard laundry list of military agencies. The first 17 topics all have the same technical point of contact. Lots more opportunities for well-comtrolled engineers to get a government contract for a well-controlled study project.
SBIR proposers and wannabes want to know: what is MDA looking for? Defense agencies typically state their criteria in ways that outsiders cannot use (whatever is good for the Navy), since a federal agency isn't concerned with the economics of proposing. It doesn't even seem concerned with its own costs of reviewing. Outsiders have to look to the agency's actual awards to read its mind. An example of what MDA has become: It funded two Mission Research projects in Phase 1. Mission Research has been an R&D company since 1970 and has won 242 SBIR awards from DOD since 1984. Its website mentions commercial products but talks only about sales of R&D to happy customers who pony up $90M a year to feed 450 employees. One project will develop a tool to simulate common schemes and allow for direct evaluation of their efficacy under typical environments which tool would then be used to choose and optimize mitigation schemes for given mission scenarios of photo-detectors. The second project will design, simulate, and perform layout on a series of small scale integrated circuits to be used as replacements for 5400 series devices used in many military and space systems. Both projects sound like the ordinary R&D for which small companies have no particular advantage. MDA here is merely filling minor gaps in its R&D by substituting a small company for open competition. If Congress ever wanted economic impact from SBIR (other than motherhood words) these kinds of projects will NOT deliver it. MDA says not only does it not care about economic impact or commercial investment as a route to better products, it doesn't even want much innovation. MDA Phase 1 winners (hooray!) should read their notification letters carefully for rules on submitting Phase 2. MDA abandoned the BMDO concept that Phase 2 should be proposed when the company feels the technology is ready to compete. Instead, MDA has adopted the bureaucratically convenient rule of considering only Phase 2s that they have formally invited to propose and only in a narrow window in October. It's their money and they can do almost any foolishness they want with it. If your supplier of a key material can't deliver on time, you may have to wait a year for the next window. That way MDA can give many more Phase 2s to companies doing paper studies and software, which seemed to be their aim in shifting their SBIR organization anyway. MDA Emerges from Cocoon(Apr 23)Missile Defense finally revealed its SBIR approach in announcing 381 Phase 1 winners from 274 companies. Plus it named 34 Phase 2 winners since the regime change last October. It looks like a mix of predictable contract research and technical innovation. It will take some analyses to tease out the real strategy in the absence of any publicly useful statements by MDA. Wouldn't want those terrorists to know what they're up to. It is clear that a lot of companies whom BMDO had treated as living dead that subsisted wholly on government contracts are back in the mix with much of the same limited promise and limited scope. To MDA's credit, it also published the abstracts with the names. Some contracts are already underway and the Phase 2 submission window will only open for October (as the rules are presently stated). Two companies got five wins: Fiber Materials and Materials Modification. Five got four wins: Advanced Ceramics, ALPHATECH, Applied Physical Electronics, MicroCoating Technologies, and Structured Materials Industries. Note the dominance of materials companies in the multiple winners. But the problem with most of the new materials is that they are too good (= too expensive) for commercial use and thus they will go no farther than the government is willing to take them. A few innovative sounding things like a laser refrigerator, more GaN crystal growth methods, Ferroelectric Random Access Memory, and a spin transistor, buried in a mountain of the usual safe R&D stuff like sensor network management software, an altitude sensor, YABMI (yet another battle management internet), scramjet enhancement (why bother with "enhancement"), a rain erosion test thing, a gizmo for COIL, and spectral parameter modeling. Ah well, Phase 1 is not a serious commitment; look to Phase 2 selections to see the real SBIR philosophy. 381 is a big number that will not be big enough if MDA doesn't again convince Congress next year to halve its SBIR tax rate from the law's 2.5%. MDA's Phase 2s for the last quarter of 2001 actually have only a little junk in that most of the projects that might find use in any number of applications. Such a list is probably due to the nature of the Phase 1 selection in 2000 and 2001 when Jeff Bond selected projects on criteria that valued a future for the technology. BMDO Mixed STTR Message. After ditching the idea that SBIR should be innovative and a broad call for new technology, BMDO's STTR solicitation says it hasn't yet found its footing. After a long-winded recitative on BMDO's mission, the single topic of Electronics and Superconductivity invites almost anything and says that proposers need know no specifics of BMDO's program. What will BMDO actually do? Who knows? Until they go through the travail of a real Phase 1 selection, not even they know what they will do. The web site shows no Phase 2s as having been selected since Aug 1, two months before the policy bloodbath. BMDO Cuts Its SBIR Market 2001 Performance of BMDO SBIR Companies
Some Other SBIR Public Companies Not Supported by BMDO
dateline 2001
Dress Right, Dress.. Having gutted the innovation of its SBIR, BMDO wants to grab all the missile defense programs. The Wall Street Journal reports that Gen Kadish wants to control the funding and management (bureaucratic terms for ownership) of the Army, Navy, and Air Force anti-missile programs. Centralization is a bureaucrat's first instinct and is usually a wet blanket on innovation which requires some independent actors. the cancellation seems to have been largely driven by the recommendations of Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, who heads the BMDO. Gen. Kadish has gone out of his way under both the Clinton and Bush administrations to delay, dumb down and otherwise impede the most promising options for near-term missile defense: short- and long-range anti-missile systems based on the Navy's existing $60B Aegis fleet air defense infrastructure. [Frank Gaffney, Washington Times, Dec 18] Gaffney is the ultra-hawk and the Washington Times is the ultra right-wing allegedly normal newspaper. The lead headline every day calls some strike of Republicans against Democrats. Missile Defense Not So Easy A Pile of Free Money. Even though BMDO has not yet issued any sign of how it will run its SBIR, a quick calculation says that its biggest problem will be too much money. If the planned Republican wish of $8.3B comes true, and most of it is still RDT&E, and the lion's share (70%) still is spent with contractors, BMDO's SBIR should be something like $145M. Awkwardly, SBIR's structure of a little Phase 1 money makes any huge increase almost unspendable. BMDO thus faces the choice of awarding a gazillion Phase 1s or funding just about every Phase 2 proposal. It must either lower its standards or default its legal obligation to spend 2.5% on SBIR. If you have a decent idea or a decent Phase 2 concept (don't they all?) this is the year to float it.
Success Breeds Failure. BMDO's latest issue of its Update quarterly newsletter on commercialization highlights co-investing as a prelude to BMDO's Oct 1 announcement that it was no longer interested. After all, what better indicator is there than real money form an outside investor to demonstrate industry's interest to move the innovation beyond prototype?, says one BMDO office; we will pursue just our mission, says the same office within weeks. Interestingly, the piece shows 22 SBIR companies as co-investors in other SBIR companies. In the three years 1997-2000, BMDO's SBIR (Phase 2) awards attracted $180M to match BMDO's $200M. Now, if the new approach survives a Congressional attack on Dark Age management, all that will be history. Congress might well ask why success has been abandoned after years of showing just the kind of fruit that could sell SBIR. But then, the Dark Force management would like SBIR to go away and if they cannot kill it in law, they would least abduct it in practice.
Bureau Couldn't Stand Prosperity. Rumor has it that BMDO has decided to ditch its 15-year SBIR success story and adopt the military model. That means that commercial potential will get lip service. If they like your engineering, any commercial fantasy will suffice. If they don't like your engineering, no great commercial story will save you. Look for opaque management, vague debriefings, and schedules that serve the bureau. The premium for proposers will be on schmoozing the internal BMDO people who are seizing the reins. Look for repeated and even sequential contracts to favored contractors who have learned to play ball with the internal people. Don't look for any announcements.
One Rose Does Not Make a Summer says the general. BMDO Director Kadish says that one test success doesn't say much about reliability. Nevertheless, the advocates are screaming for deployment, apparently in the hope that such a system would never be seriously tested. People who think hitting a bullet with a bullet is so revolutionary should remember that DARPA did it once in the mid-80s. Now BMDO faces the age-old question: do we freeze the technology that gave us our one success and develop a system around it, or do we keep advancing technology until we have a much better system. One tiny part of BMDO used to have a role to advance the technology option with technologies that might be available in the marketplace. SBIR. Lately, the "let's deploy" faction has found a way to divert the technology adventure into routine support kind of stuff. But there's still a lot of money floating through BMDO under a Bush anti-missile religion, and BMDO still has enough SBIR left over to do the really exciting new technology things on top of the mundane. Even though BMDO said that its interceptor smashed the oncoming missile (and its political opponents) into smithereens just by hitting it at the Mach many relative speed, BMDO will seek a hotter impact to blow even the smithereens into smithereens. General Sciences (Souderton, PA) gets a Phase 2 SBIR to develop hot materials (Hi-Therm Reactive Materials) that blast the target at impact more than mere inert material would do. Will their marginal weight be worth the marginal kill potential? Every pound of zero value-added weight reduces acceleration, fuel economy, and maneuver. Commercial potential? Oh sure. No, this is war stuff and the military will have to continue the development after Phase 2. Chances of that happening? General Sciences has had 37 SBIRs from DOD since the mid-80s, including several on such exothermic materials, which explains what about half the employees have been doing for 15 years. The other half must be attracting military money somehow for stuff that only a general could love if he doesn't have to pay for it.
20 BMDO STTRs Seed Those Newbies. BMDO so far this year has approved six SBIR Phase 2s for five companies. For five of the companies it is their first BMDO Phase 2 award and for the other company it is its second award. BMDO (the first last year) believes in innovations with a market appeal and thus weeds out repeat proposers who don't have much original or have already proved to be poor at commercializing. If you are new and you look marketable, your best chance for SBIR money is BMDO. And if the Congress ever wants to use real metrics for evaluation SBIR, it will look to BMDO as the model of what to do and how to do it. For the long run, BMDO is seeding the technologies of the future that will find their ways into BMDO systems (if they ever get fielded) and eventually the other military services will get a free ride as the private markets do the heavy investment lifting and take the big risks. One exception, though, Kazak Composites, has had a slew of Phase 1s and three Phase 2s elsewhere for what sound like applications of variants of its core technology. Although abstracts are deliberately vague, it sounds like BMDO has joined the application parade under probable pressure from the same kind of safety-first internal people that drive service SBIR awards. The other are first-time DOD. BMDO Funds 36% Market 2000 Performance of BMDO SBIR Companies
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