Techshot has a 25-year-history of developing and integrating spaceflight hardware, and serves as an Implementation Partner to NASA and CASIS for enabling space flight experimentation on ISS. The company's success with microgravity facilities such as the Avian Development Facility, the Advanced Space Experiment Processor and the Bone Densitometer, position it as a leader in offering these unique services. When coupled with the innovative capabilities of LMM and LMM-DS, FITS will give NASA an even greater ability to serve the investigator community it supports. Furthermore, with the ability of commercial launch vehicles to get more experiment samples into orbit, the economics of transporting and processing materials in microgravity should become far more compelling. Eventually, given sufficient economical commercial launch vehicle transporting capacity, when coupled with Techshot's cadre of space processing equipment, FITS could become an important element for processing larger quantities of high-value materials for NASA customers aboard ISS.
Techshot is committed to investing in the commercialization of FITS. Beginning with this Phase I award, Techshot will build a technology demonstrator with internal funds. Furthermore, the company will self-fund the development, integration and qualification of several of the company's SBIR-derived technologies (including FITS), and then lease that flight hardware to NASA, and other government (e.g., NIH) and commercial entities for their use in conducting advanced scientific research and processing in space. FITS technology would be included in the compliment of Techshot payloads that SpaceX envisions for its autonomous DragonLab free flyer. Researchers from Procter & Gamble recently visited Techshot headquarters to discuss using Techshot technologies such as FITS to advance several of their consumer products by learning more about how materials behave in microgravity. This could give rise to improvements in the composition and manufacture of their products, and prove to be valuable financially to the company.
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