In addition to NASA space vehicles, commercial space vehicles may benefit from this technology as well. Paragon has been working with a number of commercial space companies to design their thermal control systems. Due to the nature of the vehicles and their concept of operations, cold plates and sublimators almost always end up being included in these systems along with a pumped fluid loop. The same mass and reliability improvements discussed previously may potentially be applied to these commercial space vehicles as well. The main application this SBIR could directly impact is the Altair lunar lander, in particular operation of the ascent module once it separates from the descent module. However, other NASA applications could benefit from this research program as well. For example, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle may see similar benefits. Instead of an ascent module and descent module on Altair, Orion has a crew module and a service module. Just like the Altair ascent module separates from the descent module before lifting off of the lunar surface, the Orion crew module separates from the service module before re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Because of the analogous arrangement of these modules, Orion may see similar mass and reliability benefits from an ISDC due to combining multiple functions into one piece of hardware and/or strategic location of various components between the two modules and the associated "gear ratios" for launch propellant.
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