Paragon Space Development Corporation to be Honored as
Tibbetts Award Winner
Washington, D.C. — Paragon Space Development Corporation of Tucson, Arizona has been selected as one of the winners of the 2007 Tibbetts Awards. Paragon Space Development Corporation will receive the award on Oct. 10 at the Westin Washington City Center, located at 1400 M Street NW in Washington, D.C.
Named for Roland Tibbetts—the person acknowledged as the father of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program—these prestigious national awards are made annually to those small firms, projects, organizations and individuals judged to exemplify the best in SBIR achievement. Paragon Space Development Corporation is one of 55 U.S. companies to receive this award. This year Paragon was selected from more than 4,000 companies to receive contracts and grants under the SBIR Program.
SBIR provides Paragon with a unique vehicle for innovative technology, positioning Paragon as a key provider of Environmental Control & Life Support Systems. SBIR enables Paragon to significantly contribute to otherwise cost-prohibitive endeavors such as those pursued by NASA. SBIR provides Paragon with funding not generally available in small business budgets to research, develop, and test the Navy contaminated water diving system, spacecraft hardware, an expensive and complex enterprise. SBIR also provides the opportunities to coordinate with NASA to ensure the research is meaningful, guaranteeing a more commercially attractive product. Finally, SBIR supports internal R&D resources, enabling Paragon’s dedication to advanced technology development. Given the cost and time commitments required for spacecraft hardware development, SBIR support has been, and remains, critical to the success of Paragon’s pioneering technology development and commercialization.
The combination of funding, customer coordination by the Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative, and relationship building makes SBIR valuable. Through SBIR, Paragon was able to create a fully tested integral radiator design, demonstrate its skill set in radiator technology development while gaining visibility within the aerospace industry. This also strengthened its relationship with NASA. Paragon’s significant role of providing mission critical subsystems, such as the heat rejecting radiators for the Orion Spacecraft, the Space Shuttle replacement (the vehicle that will carry American astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars) is the Phase III SBIR. SBIR support has allowed Paragon to become a leader in spacecraft radiator technology development, a difficult task considering the financial constraints and limited opportunities within a small commercial sector.
Paragon Space Development Corporation is a woman-owned small business and full-service aerospace engineering and technology development firm. We are a major supplier of Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) and subsystem design for the aerospace industry. We are also experts in thermal control, both for spacecraft on orbit and during re-entry, and hyper-velocity aircraft. We are a leader in the integration of systems engineering with human factors, risk management, and business processes for high technology endeavors in water, on land, and in space.
For more information contact Leslie Melton at Paragon Space Development Corporation at 520-903-1000 extension 41 or Jere Glover with the Small Business Technology Council at 202-662-9700.
Since its inception in 1995, SBTC (sbtc.org) has played a crucial role in promoting congressional legislation and federal regulations that aid small, technology-based companies—including re-authorization of the SBIR program.
