The Phase I program was structured to primarily support a critical need of NASA AMTD-2. Specifically, developing a process that can safely and economically perform mirror backside light weighting of very large telescopes. The Phase II project will result in a technology that will be immediately available to support broad a range of NASA space and ground based optics programs. The Phase II workscope is structured to support the 1/3 scale AMTD-2 mirror fabrication and scale up efforts, so the results of this SBIR will very likely be applied under ongoing and future NASA projects. Raytheon has stated in a letter of support that the Ormond milling technology is a critical technology to reduce machining and fabrication times, as well as risk in processing of ceramic and glass ceramic substrates. They state that the process has potential applicability to several NASA programs including JDEM, IXO, LISA, ICESAT, ATLAST, CLARREO, ACE. Trex has stated that this technology is critical to manufacturing the difficult to machine SiC optics materials that are produced there. The developments made under the proposed SBIR support any application where brittle materials are machined, especially applications where challenging ceramics such as SiC must be machined in bulk. One large market area is the ceramic armor industry. The developments made under this SBIR will directly support requirements of current efforts to manufacture ceramic armor at Ormond. This application represents a huge market but there are still important developments to make. Ormond is currently working with Army contractors to determine ballistic performance of milled ceramic armor panels. The technology will be commercialized in these and other industries through technology licensing that will allow the large NASA primes to implement it in their own facilities. Ormond has successfully commercialized technologies in the past, either through licensing or custom manufacturing system sales. Additionally, Ormond will be capable of commercializing the technology though smaller scale manufacturing performed in-house.
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